


You and Me and the Moon

by trickybonmot



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Angst, Drama, First Kiss, First Time, Frottage, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Romance, Slash, case fic sort of, classic horror-style werewolf, government plots, heightened sense of smell, not a sexy werewolf, were!lock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-05
Updated: 2013-04-19
Packaged: 2017-11-13 15:37:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 47,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/505041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trickybonmot/pseuds/trickybonmot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock is bitten by a werewolf and has to find a way to cope with his new condition.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bite

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/20063.html?thread=120319071#t120319071) on the kinkmeme.

Another case, another reeking pile of tedious garbage. Literally, this time, as Sherlock roots through a full skip searching for the suspect’s discarded mobile. It’s a long shot, but if it can be shown that those pictures were saved on his hard drive--ah. His hand closes, at last, on the slim body of a phone, greasy with some unidentified substance which Sherlock doesn’t bother thinking about. He flips it open, but the battery, of course, is dead, so he closes it again, bags and pockets it. The next step is to climb back out of the skip, which he manages with his usual grace, his feet splashing in a puddle of grimy rainwater as he touches down. As he’s peeling off his gloves, a flash of movement catches his eye further back in the alley, and he freezes, considering how to proceed. He isn’t armed; it wasn’t supposed to be that sort of night. The mouth of the alley is a bright rectangle to his left. 

Something moves again, in the shadows to his right. There’s a rustle, and a sound of heavy breath.

Probably only a transient...but what if it isn’t? It’s possible 

“Hello?” calls Sherlock, adopting an air of authority. “Whoever you are, you had better come out. This is a serious matter.” 

He waits...nothing. He picks up his coat from where he left it folded up on a bit of relatively clean cardboard, swings it on, and advances down the alley.

“I’m warning you, this is a very serious matter--”

But he’s cut off as a black shadow leaps toward him. He raises his arms just in time to deflect a heavy, hurled weight that sends him staggering backwards as the thing--the _animal_ , he realizes--crashes into the wall and lands with a scrabbling of nails on the pavement. Sherlock just has time to find his feet before it’s coming at him again, black and snarling. He can’t tell anything about it except that it’s large, black and angry. He dodges two more of its lunges, but on the third, its teeth close about his right arm, and he can’t suppress a strangled cry as sharp fangs tear through the sleeve of his coat and sink into tender flesh. Panicking now, he slams his left fist into the side of its head once, twice, three times until it lets go. Taking advantage of its momentary confusion, Sherlock turns and flees toward the mouth of the alley. He can hear it following him, but his legs are long and he runs fast. He keeps running until he comes to the main road, to an intersection bright with lights and traffic. He whirls, partly because he’s out of breath and partly because he wants to _see_ it, but there’s no sign of it, now. 

“Problem, sir?” It’s a policeman, looking mild mannered and a bit suspicious. 

“No, nothing,” Sherlock says, pulling himself together. “It’s fine. I don’t suppose you saw a--a sort of dog, or...?” He trails off, realizing how strange he sounds as the cop regards him doubtfully. “Nevermind, it’s nothing. Good night. Thank you.”

He holds his arm against his chest and goes to hail a cab.

***

John, dozing in front of the television, wakes up with a start when Sherlock comes in. He knows at once that something is wrong, can tell it by Sherlock’s pallor and the weird light in his eyes. 

“Sherlock, what--jesus, what is that smell? Have you been rolling in garbage?”

“I got the phone,” Sherlock says tightly. “I got Isaacoff’s phone. Text Lestrade, would you, and I’ll just.” Without finishing his sentence, he totters over to fold down into his armchair.

“Sherlock?” John stands and goes to him. He pulls Sherlock’s hand away from where it’s gripping his arm, and it comes away red with blood. 

“Fuck,” says John. “Jesus, what happened? Help me get your coat off, come on.” Sherlock is like a puppet in his hands, standing up placidly and allowing John to remove his coat and shirt. John’s face goes stony when he sees the injury, professionalism flooding in to erase any emotions he may feel. 

“Wait right here,” he says. He goes to the bathroom for gauze and a towel and a squirt-bottle of warm water. He can hear Sherlock murmuring all the while, “it was a dog, I think. An animal. I got the phone, though. Got it. The phone.”

“You’re delirious,” John tells him. “Just try to stay with me. I’m going to clean this up, and then we’ll take a little trip, ok?”

“A trip.”

“That’s right. Just a little ride in a nice taxi cab.”

Two hours later, they come home from the St. Bart’s emergency department. Sherlock has sixteen stitches, and he’s been given jabs for rabies and tetanus, and a course of prophylactic antibiotics. He was subdued throughout his treatment, and John knows him well enough to recognize that it’s more than the ordinary effects of shock, but he also knows that Sherlock would rather hang himself than be admitted to the hospital, so they go home. Sherlock brushes his own teeth and then goes to bed. John waits a few minutes before going after him. He taps gently on the door, but gets no answer. Hesitantly, he pushes it open, to find Sherlock naked and sleeping curled up on top of his bedclothes. John rubs his thumbnail across his chin, thinking, then goes to get the duvet from his own bed. He spreads it over Sherlock’s body, tucking it snugly about his shoulders so that he has room to breathe. Then John gets a chair from the kitchen, places it next to Sherlock’s bed, and prepares himself for a long night. 

Sherlock wakes up the next morning, but he’s feverish. John makes him swallow another antibiotic, as well as lots of water and broth and herbal tea, and an NSAID. The fever worries him, of course, but the wound looks excellent, not infected. Perhaps he was coming down with the flu already when it happened.

The day after that, Sherlock is well enough to complain somewhat coherently. He’s developed a runny nose, which John finds an immeasurable relief, although it makes Sherlock impossible.

“Did you send that text to Lestrade?” he asks. 

“I did. He sent someone round to get the phone while you were under. He texted three hours later to say they had their man.”

“Hm,” says Sherlock. John can’t tell if he’s pleased at this news or not. 

“You want me to bring you another Hot Lemon?”

“Ugh, certainly not,” says Sherlock, blowing his nose. “Vile stuff. Stop fussing over me. What day is it?”

John blinks. “Um. Tuesday.”

“Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“I called in.”

“Ludicrous. You’ll go back tomorrow.”

“It’s my day off.”

“Thursday, then.”

Sherlock is so cantankerous on Wednesday that it’s obvious he’s going to recover, and John is more than happy to get back to the surgery the following day.


	2. The Dreaming Moon

Four weeks later, things are back to normal. Sherlock’s wounds are now a sharp crescent of bright pink scar tissue, which will fade in time to become, if not invisible, at least not terribly disfiguring. John comes down the stairs with a loaded overnight bag to find Sherlock on his feet and pacing around the living area of the flat, as though intent on a difficult problem. John suppresses a sigh; Sherlock has been more than usually impenetrable the past few days. Just as well he’s going out.

“Goodbye, Sherlock. See you some time tomorrow, probably.”

“Hmm, what? Where are you going?” Sherlock leaves off pacing to look at him.

John gives an exasperated sigh. “I told you this morning. I’m going on this date. This moon-viewing thing.”

“What, all night?”

“That’s rather the point. It’s a camp-out thing. Abigail wanted to do it, something about a ‘mega moon’ or something. The full moon’s supposed to appear larger than normal.”

“Astronomical trivia. Fascinating.” Sherlock deadpans, then goes back to pacing, round and round, to the mantle, to the kitchen, to the window. 

“Well, lucky for all of us, _you’re_ not invited.” John shrugs into his jacket and picks up his bag. “See you later. Don’t forget to eat that leftover Thai before it spoils.”

It’s slightly distressing that Sherlock hasn’t even bothered to offer up any insulting deductions about his current girlfriend--but then, why should it be? John resolves to count his blessings, for the moment.

***

Sherlock hears John leave the flat, the trotting of his feet down the stairs, the slam of the front door below. These sounds imprint themselves on his senses, but he dismisses them in favor of pacing. The flat is quiet now, except for the sound of his bare feet, on carpet, on wood, on lino, on wood, on carpet--

What had he been thinking about? He stops. His mind seems to be whirling, and yet somehow it doesn’t have a thought in it. The sensation feels like craving, or withdrawal, but he hasn’t been involved with any substance that should cause these effects. It’s strange.

Thinking it might help with his focus, he sets a pot of coffee to brewing. He picks up a book he’d been reading, loses interest within the first paragraph, and starts pacing again. He stops when he catches himself, pulls the half-brewed coffee pot out of the machine (a dribble of coffee sizzling on the hot-plate), pours himself a mug, and sits resolutely down in his armchair, holding the cup with both hands so that it scalds him, grounding him.

Has he been acting strangely? Not strangely enough to excite comment from John, but then, John has seen him through all sorts of curious tantrums. Externally, he probably doesn’t seem much different than normal, but internally--

_What is wrong with me?_

He’s off-kilter somehow. There are things he ought to be working on, research he should be doing, and yet somehow he can’t bring himself to think about all that. He takes a sip of coffee, unsugared, hoping the too-hot, too-bitter bite of it will help him catch hold of something in the overclocked whirring of his psyche. But...nothing.

He does, at least, prevent himself from pacing. He sits and drinks the whole cup of coffee, then lurches to his feet and pours another. _Christ_ , what is the matter with him? Physical symptoms? Nothing--except, perhaps, what may be attributed to the caffeine: cold sweat, an elevated pulse. He sits. He drinks. The afternoon passes.

At some point he gets up to urinate, then goes to pour another cup. His hand jitters as he pulls the carafe out, clattering it against the worktop, only to find it--empty! Snarling, he throws it to the floor, thin glass shattering.

The noise stops him. He goes and sits again, wrapping his robe tightly around him. The caffeine was a mistake, he feels much worse, now, nauseous and jumpy, his head spinning. He suddenly wishes that John hadn’t left.

John. Oh _there’s_ something he can think about. His thoughts crash and pile up on the idea of John, like cars on the expressway. Blood surges hotly into his groin, the sensation mixing unpleasantly with his general ague. Yes, _all right_ , he does think of John that way, but it’s fine, it’s meaningless. Some part of him notes that this is unusual, this sudden violent arousal, but the whatever-it-is in his mind won’t let go of the idea. He _wants_ John, wants him _right now_ , but he’s off with _that woman_. Sherlock sees her in his mind’s eye, diminutive, a mousy-haired entomologist with bees tattooed on her wrists, and he could take her and just _shake her_ , but she’s not here, she’s with John, and they’re watching the _bloody boring_ moonrise or something.

There’s a strange sound. Sherlock clicks his mouth shut, and it stops. He’d been--what? Growling? Snarling? He hates his chair, suddenly, leather and chrome, and lunges across into the other chair, John’s chair, overstuffed dusty velveteen, with John’s plaid blanket on it. He buries his face, and the smell soothes him, the darkness soothes him. There’s a moon in the darkness.

John has gone to watch the moon rise. There’s something about that, something--yes. It rushes back to him all at once, the way dreams sometimes do. He dreamed about the moon. Has been dreaming about it for perhaps a week, always the same dream, the moon rising over London, and he’s crouched in an alley somewhere, waiting, and then running, alone and powerful, reading the wind, deducing--

What? He moans. It’s nonsense. In his dream his mind is full of nonsense, a horrible, disorienting maelstrom of illogic, of _needs_ and _wants_ , and yet he feels himself to be all-knowing, to be powerful and free. Awake now, he recognizes the images from a month ago; it’s the alley where he found the phone, it’s the moon coming up against the skyline while he placates a policeman. The moon was full that night, too. As it will be tonight.

These clues arrange themselves in his mind, trying to mean something, but they form an equation of nonsense, something unreasonable, incomprehensible, a nightmare. The falseness of it assaults him, and he moans, his stomach clenching, a spasm that creeps over him like a fever. The smell of coffee strikes him like an armoured fist, and he wants to vomit, but then other smells crowd in, until his world is _all smells_ , a disorienting patchwork of _coffee-John-Sherlock-dust-wood-wool-plastic-padthai-leather-sweat-mildew-carexhaust-humansHUMANS HUMANS!!_

Then everything goes very strange indeed.

***

John and Abigail are lying side-by-side on a grassy slope. A campfire crackles somewhere off to the right, and there’s laughter; Abby’s friends. They’re nice people, John likes them. The edge of the moon is showing wide and yellow above the tree-fringed horizon, where the sky is purple with the last of the twilight.

“Lovely!” Abigail sighs. “You’d never see this in London. I’m glad Sherlock saw fit to give you a leave of absence.”

John feels a twinge of something like guilt. 

“Let’s not talk about him,” he says. Too quickly? 

The moment stretches out awkwardly, so he kisses her. Problem solved.

The moon rises, stately as a queen, pulling all the earth’s creatures into her tidal embrace.

***

Nothing in the flat is not broken. 

Sherlock wakes up mid-morning, lying naked on his side in a pile of broken glass in the living room. By one o’clock, he’s tweezed out what he could (metal clicking against glass embedded in his flesh, a feeling he can never get used to), cleaned and bandaged the more serious cuts. His injuries could have been much worse; he hasn’t severed any tendons or major arteries, but there are numerous shallow cuts criss-crossing his ribs and hips, his upper arm and one thigh and the palms of both hands. Then there are the bruises, as well as a feeling of deep and pervasive muscular fatigue, as though he’d swum the English Channel. 

The last thing he remembers is burying his face in John’s blanket.

He puts water on for tea (the enameled metal kettle is chipped, now, but still in once piece), then opens the refrigerator, not sure what he’s looking for. His gaze lands on the cardboard container of Thai food, and the next thing he knows it is in his hand, and he is shoveling the cold noodles into his mouth with his bare fingers. When it’s empty, he goes for the second container, which is full of dried-out white rice. This, too, he eats, not caring that some of it lands on the floor.

As he finishes eating, the kettle whistles. The noise sounds like a scream, unbearably shrill; it takes all his composure to turn off the burner without tearing off the knob, but he does manage it. Suddenly tea seems like too much trouble. He opens a cupboard and finds cups, not broken, fills one and gulps tap water until he’s out of breath. Good, that’s better. He feels human again, almost.

He turns to face the room, which is thoroughly wrecked, all of its contents jumbled together as though it had been picked up and shaken. Now. What the bloody hell happened?

He lays out the facts in his mind. Fact: he had some sort of... _episode_. Fact: He blacked out for a period of approximately 15 hours. Fact: he came to naked and injured, evidently struck by a variety of sharp and blunt objects. Fact: the flat has been demolished, likely by him, likely in a state of anaesthesia.

Possibilities: He was drugged (substance: phencyclidine?)(perpetrator: ?)(motive: ?)(mode of delivery: ?); he was ill (pathogen: ?)(connected to bite/illness of a month ago?); psychotic/dissociative episode (trigger: ?). Conclusion: too soon to say. Need more information.

First thing first: he urinates in a jar, placing the specimen in the refrigerator. Next, he goes back into the bathroom, finds a syringe and a tourniquet (John keeps a very comprehensive medical kit), and draws a sample of blood from the crease of his elbow. This, too, he refrigerates. He’ll go to Molly’s lab later and see what he can see _vis a vis_ substances, pathogens, etc.

As for the rest: he doesn’t know what time John is coming home, but it’s clear that Sherlock can’t allow him to walk into this...situation. He’ll worry. Therefore, Sherlock needs to clean up as quickly as possible. He can look for clues at the same time. Sighing deeply, he opens the broom closet, and begins.

As he works, things start to come together. Or, rather, he begins to see just how they came apart. Everything that was on a flat surface has been knocked over, in every room of the flat except John’s, which had the door closed. Cupboards and closets were also not opened. Light and even somewhat bulky pieces of furniture have been knocked over, including John’s armchair, which Sherlock rights carefully. The upholstery is torn at the back of the seat. Sherlock’s eyes catch on something: a few short, slightly curved black hairs, like dog’s hairs, clinging to the velveteen. He uses tweezers to place them in a small plastic bag.

Sherlock doesn’t have a close relationship with many physical objects, but some of the damage does disturb him. The Strad was safely locked in its case, but the bow has been messily snapped. His skull is intact, but it’s been marked, scored with long scratches. Among a heap of books lying askew on the floor, he finds his old leather-bound edition of Treasure Island, the pages torn, the binding scratched and scored all over, pulped at one corner, exactly as though it had been chewed by a large dog. He can’t quite bear to bin it, but he can’t leave it out for John to find, so he takes it into his bedroom.

The destruction is less, here, but probably only because he doesn’t keep much in his bedroom to begin with. All the blankets have been rucked off the bed, though, and there’s a large yellow stain, still damp, in the center of the fitted sheet. He sniffs it: urine. Sniffs again, brows drawn: not his own. Not even human, in fact. Strange. After some deliberation, he wads up the sheet and places it in a plastic garbage bag by itself, tying the bag shut. Another specimen. 

A few more small tasks and the flat is in tolerable shape again. He, on the other hand, is wearing out, his bones aching in a way they haven’t in years, badly enough to cloud his thoughts. After taking out the garbage (several large bags full), he draws a hot bath, and takes the skull into it with him to think.

The water feels remarkably good, heat seeping into some empty place at his core. It revives him a little, and he turns the skull over in his hands, examining the marks on it. If he allows himself to accept the evidence he’s gathered so far, the long, shallow gouges quickly reveal their true nature: they’re teeth marks, from quite a large and powerful set of jaws. He places his hand over the skull’s cranium, trying to judge the size of the mouth that could have done this. It’s big, bigger than his fingers can reach. 

He allows himself to sink deeper into the warm water, holding up the skull with one hand so that he can address it.

“There’s been an animal in here,” he says. “And nobody else. Just me. And I was not myself. What does this mean?” But the skull doesn’t answer, and eventually Sherlock sets it down outside the tub, and closes his eyes.

The bathroom is cold and white all around him, sterile as a well-ordered mind. He can feel its comforting whiteness, the surrounding grid of the white tile floor and walls enclosing him. But behind his eyelids he sees only the blood-dark workings of his body, trapped in a basin of tepid fluid, the warm, red kernel of at the center of everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure if we have any evidence that Sherlock drinks coffee at home, but given his love of stimulants, I'm assuming he'd have some around.


	3. Save a Secret

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some interior action.

John’s date with Abigail has ended...ambiguously. When they got tired of moon-viewing and decided to turn in, it became apparent that their tent didn’t offer enough aural privacy for either of them to be comfortable with more than some mild making out and cuddling, about as far as they’d gone before. When her friends dropped them off at her flat, John helped her carry the camping things up the stairs, then stood awkwardly for a moment wondering what would happen next. She came and put her arms around him, standing on tip-toe to plant a kiss beneath his ear.

“Do you want to stay a while?” she asked. “Have a shower, maybe a nap?”

It was perfectly clear what she was asking. And yet, somehow, he found he wasn’t keen.

He liked Abigail. She was smart, and pretty, and had a wonderful laugh, but with her delicate body here in his arms, he felt...wrong-footed. He didn’t want to go on. He could do it anyway, of course, could give her what she wanted, but it would be for her, not for him. He’d been around long enough to know that that sort of kindness was anything but. Reluctantly, he pulled back from her embrace.

“I’m afraid I don’t have time tonight,” he said. “I have, uh, paperwork.”

“Ooh, married to the job, eh?” she smiled up at him. “I know what that’s like. I was going to have to nip out at some point anyway, to feed my aphids, but we could have had a few hours to ourselves. I thought I’d take you with me, actually. Ever been in an insect pest research lab?” 

“Uh, no. Sounds interesting.”

“Well, maybe next time then. Are you free on the weekend?”

“I think so. You know, depending.”

“Of course.” 

She kissed him goodbye. On an impulse, he decided to walk home, and now he’s on foot, free hand jammed in his jacket pocket, hoping a long walk will help him get a few things clear in his mind.

It’s weird that he doesn’t want Abby. She ought to be just his type. She’s been the one chasing him, though, from the beginning, and he’s found her attention flattering enough to keep going along with it, up to a point. But now, it seems, he’s reached that point, where he has to admit to himself that his heart’s not really in it. Where is his heart, then?

Oh, he _knows_. A sigh puffs out of him, drawing a concerned glance from an old lady with a walker as they pass each other. Hew knows, he knows perfectly well. It’s just another one of those things he’s been pushing off dealing with, until the point where it becomes impossible to ignore. 

And why shouldn’t he ignore it, anyway? Maybe he’ll never know true happiness, but at least he’ll go on being steady old John, have a normal life, get a wife, make babies, carry on the family name, which is apparently something some people care about. How great could it be anyway?

An image comes to him, unbidden, of the way Sherlock’s lips quirk when he has made an especially satisfying deduction, and something inside him twists up in response. 

Oh, it would be great. It would be _so fucking_ great.

All right, so, accept that: it would be great, fine. But that’s assuming Sherlock even feels the same, which John has no reason to suppose that he does. And what if he doesn’t? What if they’re just going to go on being crime-solving flat-mate buddies forever, and John’s going to give up on women and Sherlock’s going to just go on being...well, _Sherlock_? No, it will not do, it _really_ won’t. Something has to happen. But what if John makes a move and Sherlock rejects him and then they can’t even be crime-solving buddies anymore? _That_ won’t do, either. 

His thoughts have been down this road before, but he keeps ending up in the same place: stalemate. It’s just too frustrating for words. Reaching the door of 221, he jams his key into the lock with somewhat more force than necessary, then stomps his way up the stairs, not caring who hears. He does take a moment to collect himself before he enters the flat, steeling his emotions against whatever mordant observation Sherlock will have prepared concerning the outcome of his date. 

But when he comes in, he finds the flat nearly dark. The only light is a small metal reading lamp next to the sofa, where Sherlock sits in an untidy sprawl. He’d been reading a book on biochemistry, but must have fallen asleep; his head lolls against the back of the sofa, exposing the pale column of his neck. One side of his face is gently touched by yellow fingers of light, leaving the other side in shadow, like a painting by Rembrandt. He looks quite beautiful; John supposes there’s some level on which he really shouldn’t just stand there filling up his eyes with the sight of his sleeping friend, but that’s just life around here these days, so he does. One of Sherlock’s hands sprawls palm-up on the sofa, fingers elegantly curled as if to communicate something subtle.

But as John’s eyes adjust to the dimness, other details resolve themselves. He sees bandages on three of Sherlock’s fingers, and--worse--a dark spot on the shadowed side of his face, which reveals itself, upon closer inspection, to be a rather bad bruise beneath the eye. Without thinking, he grabs Sherlock’s chin to turn his face more into the light. 

Sherlock’s eyes flutter open at the touch, and he regards John blankly for a moment before his eyebrows draw together.

“It’s nothing,” he says, before John can ask. He asks anyway. 

“Sherlock, what happened? Were you in a fight?”

“I told you, it’s _nothing_.” Sherlock pushes his hands roughly away. 

“Sorry,” says John, straightening up. “I just thought maybe I could--”

“Please leave it, John.” 

Sherlock’s tone isn’t angry, but it’s frightfully cold, and on top of all his thoughts of the day, it feels to John like a slap in the face. 

“All right,” John says. “All right, well, I’m a bit short on sleep, so I’ll just have a shower and go to bed. See you in the morning.”

John lies awake for a good couple of hours, curled up around a cold knot of indecision. He feels like he ought to go down there and _do_ something...but what, exactly? Sherlock can take care of himself. He doesn’t need John to kiss his boo-boos. He ought to go down and demand to know, at least, he should have that right, as Sherlock’s friend. _Please leave it, John_ , like he was talking to a stranger. _I can’t_ , John thinks. _Please tell me. Please don’t shut me out._

In the morning, Sherlock’s back to normal, though his facial contusion is still extravagantly purple. It’s just about the size of a pair of lips--and John squashes that thought down as far as it will go. Oblivious, Sherlock makes toast and eggs for breakfast, which John chooses to interpret as an apology for his brusqueness of the night before, though he still wants to take Sherlock by the shoulders and demand to know what happened.

“Any plans today?” he asks instead, sipping his tea.

“I’m going to the lab,” Sherlock says. “You ought to call Abigail; she’ll be wondering why you didn’t stay the night. I’m not sure why you don’t like her, John, as it’s plain she likes you.”

John feels oddly comforted to know that Sherlock is paying attention. He’s still trying to formulate a comeback when Sherlock gathers up a plastic garbage back and few things from the fridge and goes out. 

***  

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Molly says. “It came back negative for everything, except caffeine and a trace of nicotine. Whoever’s blood that was, they weren’t drugged.”

“Hmm,” Sherlock says, distracted. He’s looking at the black hairs under the microscope. “Anything else of note?”

“Vitamin D deficiency. Negative for all the usual stuff. You’ll have to wait a bit for some of the results, though.”

“All right.” The hair is yielding up its secrets to him: scale pattern and medullary formation corroborate a canine origin. The bulbous root without adhering cellular material suggests that the hair fell out naturally, rather than being pulled. 

“Molly, do you know anyone who owns a very shaggy black dog?”

“Um, no,” she says, blinking in confusion. “Why?”

“Never mind.”

***

In the end, the blood and urine samples turn up nothing of interest. The stained sheet is even less helpful, although it does turn out to be urine and to contain caffeine metabolites. 

As much as he hates to admit it, Sherlock is stumped. He considers submitting himself for an actual medical examination, but he doesn’t think a doctor can tell him anything he doesn’t already know. Also, they might wish to discuss his mental health, which would be a waste of time; he’s perfectly confident of his observations.

Anyway, he does have one hypothesis, albeit far-fetched, and he will have to wait a few weeks before it can be tested. Meanwhile, he resolves not to think about it. Not thinking about it would be easy if only he had a case, but work has been extremely slow of late, so he’s forced to make his own distractions. The first order of business is to obtain some new labware to replace what was broken during his...event, and perhaps a new carafe for the coffee machine. He’s clicking through an online catalogue when he hears John’s raised voice drifting down from upstairs, on the phone with Abigail. It seems things aren’t going well.

 _Good_ , says a small voice in his head, but he tells it very sternly to be quiet. John should be happy, John should have the things he wants. 

Sherlock still remembers burying his face in the smell of John’s blanket, right before things went strange. On an impulse, he stands and goes to John’s chair, picks up the blanket and sniffs it. It still smells good, noticeably John-like, but not like it did before; it’s like a black-and-white sketch compared to a full-color photograph, a lone violin compared to an orchestra. Still, he does hold it to his face for a long moment, while John concludes his phone call with an angry apology.

He’s always been attracted to John, of course, from the very first moment. For a while he even cherished a hope that they might--but no. John is straight. Sherlock has come to terms with that. He doesn’t know why they fight with him, John’s women. And if he, Sherlock, doesn’t go out of his way to be kind to them, well, it just goes to show that they don’t care enough to fight back, to fight _for_ John against him. And John ought to have better companions than that.

 _A bit not good_ , he thinks. But that’s just life around here these days.

Anyway, now there’s this other problem. Sherlock isn’t sure what happened to him, but if it happened once, it can happen again, and he knows with a cold, stony certainty that he doesn’t want John anywhere near him if--or _when_ \--it does.

***

Three weeks later, Sherlock is having a dream. He’s looking at something through a microscope--his own microscope, that’s been smashed--but instead of something very tiny, he’s looking at something far away. The microscope has become a telescope, and he’s looking at the surface of the moon. He can see craters, plateaus, vast, dry seas. Now he’s walking on it. The surface beneath his shoes is pale and crunchy. Meaningless features loom sharp on the horizon. There’s no sign of human life anywhere, and he feels a sort of satisfaction: he’s been trying to come here, and now here he is. He walks. He can’t remember what moon rocks are made of, but no matter: he will figure it out. He will experiment and learn. He will deduce everything there is to know about his new domain. He has left the earth behind.

In fact, there it is now, the earth, rising up over the jagged peaks, blue and distant and beautiful beyond measure, teeming with all the ten-thousand things. It makes his moon look shabby and small. He feels a desire to return, and, simultaneous with it, a fear that he cannot. In the way of dreams, the fear at once becomes a certainty. Despair crashes onto him, and he opens his mouth and cries out his loss.

His cry brings others. Over the ridges they come, and across the dry sea, his brethren, the wolves. _(Sherlock.)_ At first he runs from them, afraid, but they overtake him, and then he runs with them, among them, and they are all of them crying out, mournful and afraid. _Sherlock. You’re dreaming._

He knows that voice. He half-wakes.

“Sherlock.”

It’s just John, John standing there in the doorway of his room, saying his name very calmly over and over again, and it’s like a rope that he can climb up and out of the dream.

“John?” he whispers, at last.

John lets out a little breath, as though he’d been worried.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he says. “I wasn’t sure if you’d want to be woken, but you sounded so...”

He trails off. Sherlock can’t see his face in the dark.

“Was I...crying out, or--?”

“Um. You were. Howling, I’d call it.”

“Oh,” Sherlock says. And then, the dream coming back to him, _”Oh”_. And then his hand goes to his mouth, and he’s shaking.

“Here, can I just--” There’s a movement, and then the warm of weight of John settles down next to him, and there’s an arm around his shoulders. Unthinking, he sags into the embrace, and then John’s other arm comes up, and John’s holding him, and he’s breathing in that comforting smell of John, deliciously complicated, a string quartet at least.

“I hope I’ve done the right thing,” John says, to fill the silence that wells up between them. “I go back and forth, myself, about whether I want to be woken up. If nobody wakes you, you might just forget it completely, but half the time you wake up anyway, and it’s better to have someone there, I think.”

“John.”

“Anyway, I couldn’t just listen to you, so...”

“John.”

“Yes?”

“It’s all right. You don’t have talk.”

“Okay.”

“I’m glad you woke me.”

It’s quiet again. John holds him. Honestly, Sherlock feels like he could just lie here forever, being held...and perhaps it’s that feeling that makes him put a stop to it.

“I’m better now,” he says. “You should go back to bed.”

For a moment it seems John might argue--Sherlock almost hopes he will--but then John gives his shoulders a last little squeeze and lets go.

“Good night, Sherlock,” he says.

“Good night, John.”

John leaves, and Sherlock can hear his slow tread on the stairs. For a while, he just floats, still coming down off the adrenaline of the dream, but comforted, easy.

And that’s when he realizes. Tension floods back into his limbs, and he’s glad John is gone, because he couldn’t hide this: it’s just like before. A week before the full moon, and he’s dreaming. It’s happening again. He needs a plan.


	4. Brotherhood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the lateness of this chapter! I had a busy week, and it turned out to be extra long.
> 
> Also, I think I've said in a couple of places that this would be 4 chapters, but I think it's going to be 5.

Sherlock has never liked fairy tales. Indeed, he isn’t very fond of fiction in general; why waste mental space on things that aren’t true, when the real, actual world is so very rich and wonderful, filled with enough idiots and madmen, commoners and kings to fill a library all on their own? When there are bacteria and paint and paper and soils and gravels and two-hundred-and-forty-three types of tobacco ash all waiting to be known? 

Even so, he hasn’t forgotten that stories exist. It’s good to know about them, because really, you’d be amazed how many killers fancy themselves to be acting out some role from history or legend. Lycanthropy is quite a popular delusion. 

Sherlock goes to the library. He starts with clinical psychiatric texts, but soon gives up. The symptoms of clinical lycanthropy don’t actually match what he’s going through, and the suggested treatments are laughably inappropriate. He keeps looking. 

Popular culture has much to say on the topic of werewolves: silver bullets on one hand, and a bizarre sexualization on the other. It’s infantile, and he loses patience quickly. His life is not a paranormal romance. 

So he goes deeper, older. Hours pass, and he finds his eyes blurring over a dense page of medieval German script, a typographer’s nightmare of close-spaced verticals and little black squares. There was a time when he would look at such things for fun, but he’s quickly learning that his eye is out of practice. He leans back and rubs his eyes, easing out the knots in his shoulders. It’s been hours, and all he’s learned about werewolves is how to recognize them (which he didn’t need, thank you), and how to kill them when you do (ditto). There’s nothing there about how to stop it.

His time is running out and, lacking a real solution, he only has a few days to make arrangements. He begins to catalogue his requirements. If he can’t stop the change, the problems boil to down to harm to others and harm to himself. So, one thing he needs is privacy: from John, from Mrs. Hudson (who’d been away visiting her sister last time), from anyone who might come upon him by chance. (He thinks of the scar on his arm, and suppresses a shudder.) The other thing he needs is...well. A padded cell, essentially, since it appears that his experience is characterized by a tendency to fling himself about, perhaps in reaction to being confined.

Put in those terms, it doesn’t sound so terribly difficult. It’s quite simple, really: he’s merely arranging temporary accommodations for a large, wild beast. An unreasoning, ravenous, destructive, possibly man-eating beast, whose bite will consign its victims to share its fate. Simple.

 _The bite._ Sherlock sits bolt-upright in the library as a piece of the puzzle clicks into place. Of course. _He_ was bitten. Which means there is another one out there, roaming around London. Probably more than one. But there haven’t been any news stories about strange animal sightings or maulings. That means a cover-up, and cover-ups are nearly always traceable to a single origin.

Sherlock tosses the manuscript reproduction onto a return cart and stalks out of the library, taking out his phone as he goes. It takes six rings before Mycroft answers.

“Sherlock. I am in Korea. I hope this is important.” 

“Tell me about the wolves, Mycroft.”

There’s a beat, which is as good as an admission when you’re talking to Mycroft.

“What wolves.”

“What are they, Mycroft? How do you stop them?”

He would swear he can hear Mycroft pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Sherlock, whatever you saw, whatever you think is going on, you need to forget it.”

“I know what’s going on, and I need to know how to stop it. What do you do? Shoot them?”

“It’s being looked after. It’s none of your concern.”

“It _is_ my concern.” He’s unable to suppress a frustrated snarl and this, more than anything, seems to give Mycroft pause. He answers very slowly, and Sherlock can hear the slightest tremor in his voice.

“Some of them have been shot, yes,” he says. “If possible, they are taken into custody.”

“Custody. A nice word for it! You must have to bury them pretty deep to keep this from getting out.”

“Sherlock, now is not the time.”

“Mycroft.” He tries to put everything into that word. “If this specimen were to be apprehended...there would be a problem.”

Mycroft lets out a long breath. “I’ll send you a phone number.”

Mycroft hangs up. Twenty-three minutes later, Sherlock receives a text from a different line: the promised phone number. He dials, and is answered by the voicemail message of a Dr. Flannagan. Thirty minutes after that, she calls him back.

“Sherlock Holmes?” She’s Irish born, but studied abroad, most likely in Eastern Europe, though he can’t tell in what country; probably several. She’s between thirty-eight and forty-two years of age and is studying a wind instrument, probably flute, probably as a creative release from her demanding job. The line has a slight audio delay, suggesting that the call is encrypted.

“Yes,” he says.

“I’ve been authorized to discuss certain matters with you. I’m informed that you may have encountered one of the Alpha-Nine subjects.”

“Yes,” he says again, playing along.

“Were you bitten?”

Since he was expecting this question, he’s able to answer without a pause. “No, but someone else was. This person is of some importance to an investigation I’m conducting. It would be problematic if he were...apprehended, before the case is closed.”

“Does this person know of his condition?”

Sherlock is surprised into frankness. “How could he not?”

“The precise manifestation has proven somewhat unpredictable. Some of them remember every detail of their episodes, others simply experience a blackout. The symptoms change over time.”

“Change, how?”

“The mental state they experience during their transformations. They remember more or less. The experience may become more or less distressing for them. They experience a greater or lesser spillover of the lycanthropic state into their everyday lives.”

“Spillover?” Sherlock’s mouth feels dry. 

“Nightmares, loss of emotional control, intrusive memories, libidinal outbursts, and so on. Usually worsening as the month wears on.”

“You’re joking.” 

“Not at all,” she says, pleasantly.

“Can they be treated?”

“Is that important to your investigation?”

“Yes, actually.” He matches her acidic tone.

“I see,” she says, and he can hear a kind of smirk in her voice. He begins to suspect that Dr. Flannagan is not a very pleasant sort of person. “Well, there’s always heavy-duty antipsychotics, but I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what the risks are there.”

“No, you don’t.” Sherlock suppresses a shudder. He would rather be insane. He clears his throat, trying to dispel the thin haze of panic that’s creeping in around the edges of their conversation. “You asked whether he knew of his condition. Why?”

“Well, obviously, if he does, there’s some chance he’ll consent to being confined. I’m sure you’re aware of the phase of the moon, Mr. Holmes. He’ll need to be locked away; absolute solitude is crucial, of course. And you must realize that our agents can’t be responsible for identifying individual subjects on a full-moon night, so his best bet is to be somewhere private; at home, by preference. We are, naturally, keeping quite a sharp eye on all of London’s dark little hidey-holes. If he’s anywhere out there, we’ll find him, and quickly.”

That shuts down one of Sherlock’s strategies; he’d been thinking of his homeless network, of dark abandoned spaces underground. But he believes this woman, and he believes his brother: it _is_ being looked after, with total efficiency. He wouldn’t last the night.

“I see,” is all he says.

“Is there anything else I can help you with, Mr. Holmes?”

He wants to ask a thousand more questions, but he’s not sure what sort of cover story Mycroft has provided him; he dares not appear overly curious, or overly ignorant.

“I don’t think so,” he says. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“Shit,” he mutters, after she hangs up. _Nightmares, loss of emotional control, intrusive memories, libidinal outbursts._ Dr. Flannagan has sentenced him to hell.

***

In the end, it’s almost childishly simple. He’ll do something better next month (if he hasn’t found a cure by then), but for now he can simply replicate, with minor modifications, the circumstances that served him before. 

He handles John first. It’s mere days since Sherlock dreamt he was on the moon; he’s had other dreams since, worse ones, but either he slept quietly or John has thought better of slipping downstairs to offer midnight embraces to his troubled friend. Sherlock isn’t sure which, but he can’t pretend, even to himself, that he hasn’t lain awake fervently wishing for that comfort. He can’t pretend he hasn’t slipped out to the main room to fetch a certain woolen blanket, that he hasn’t held it to his face to make his heart stop pounding, then kept holding it until his heart pounded in quite a different way, touching himself urgently beneath the enfolding warmth of his bedclothes, whispering John’s name into the darkness. 

So. All of that makes this slightly more difficult, but only slightly. It’s for John’s own good, after all. 

“John,” he says, the day before the full moon. 

“Yeah?” says John, without looking up. He is curled up on the sofa, pecking away at his laptop in the way that used to drive Sherlock mad but which now, inexplicably, he rather likes.

“I’ll need the flat to myself tomorrow night.”

That makes John look up. “Oh, really? What for?”

Sherlock answers with a look, because, among the many techniques in his lying repertoire, nonverbal ones are by far the most effective. _If you have to ask,_ he says, nonverbally.

“Oh,” says John. “ _Oh_. Got something on, have you?” He looks back at his internet. Some feeling flickers across his features, too fast for Sherlock to catch. “Who’s the lucky...um?”

Sherlock gives him another look, withering. “May I count on your cooperation?”

“Of course,” says John, then clears his throat nervously. “Yeah, of course, I can. I can go and see Harry or something.”

“Thank you.” He uses what he thinks of as the “Mycroft thank-you”, a guaranteed conversation-ender. Indeed, John says no more, and a few minutes later he closes the laptop and takes it up to his room. _Played like the proverbial violin_ , Sherlock thinks, but for once he takes no pleasure in his skill. 

Mrs. Hudson takes a bit more doing. For her, Sherlock forges a letter from an aged aunt in Sussex, asking her to come as soon as she possibly can. Mrs. Hudson hasn’t spoken to the aunt in years due to a quarrel; the truth is that she’s become quite frail with age and would welcome a visit from her estranged niece. With luck, a little show of familial care will land Mrs. Hudson in the old lady’s will, and she’ll stand to inherit quite a nice little cottage. Sherlock does rather enjoy working on the letter; picking out the proper stationery and the right ink to forge the postmark is almost interesting enough to keep his mind off of what’s coming.

Sherlock goes shopping and comes home with roast beef, chocolate bars, and two liters of a violently orange-colored sports drink. All that remains is to break into Mrs. Hudson’s flat and nick the key to 221 C, and all is in readiness. 

***

“John! So nice to see you.” John’s sister embraces him hard, giving him a thump on the back for good measure, which John returns. She’s an inch or two shorter than he is, of stockier build. Her broad face looks tired, but genuine, and he finds that he’s happy to see her.

“You as well. Thanks for having me on such short notice.”

“Yeah, about that,” Harry says, standing by while John gets his things from the back of his rental car, “what happened? You’ve never come to see me without some sort of precipitating event.”

“Well, if you must know, my flat-mate’s kicked me out for the night. I guess he needed some privacy.”

“Huh, what for? I thought you said Sherlock was a cold fish.” 

“Well, I guess I was wrong. Apparently. Anyway, I thought I’d take the excuse to visit. It’s been too long.”

While they’re talking, Harry leads him into the house. _Her_ house. She got it in the divorce with Clara. John’s still a bit angry with her about that business, but blood’s thicker than water, and all that. It’s time they put it behind them. She sits him down at her breakfast table while she makes tea.

“So, how are you?” he asks, too casually. She answers with a look. 

“I suppose you mean, am I still sober?”

John hadn’t meant that, exactly, and suddenly he feels like a therapist. _If that’s what you want to talk about_ , he thinks, but instead he just gives her a look of his own. She smiles. 

“Sixteen weeks and four days,” she answers, with some pride. “The longest stint so far. I’m starting to think it might stick.” She brings over two mugs of tea, and John raises his in a toast, which she meets with a satisfying clack of porcelain. They settle into a comfortable conversation after that, Harry telling John about her latest conquests, and John telling her about his work with Sherlock, filling her in on details that were too sensitive to put on the blog. It’s nice to have a break from Sherlock, actually, and it really has been too long since he had a good talk with Harry.

***

It’s near twilight, and Sherlock is starting to get that feeling again, that senseless buzzing sensation. This time he knows it for what it is, so he’s able to gather up his supplies and make his way to the basement apartment before he loses his faculties. 

He’s already stapled blankets over the windows, both to ensure his privacy and to protect himself from potential broken glass. The windows are barred to keep out burglars, which is a nice bonus feature of this particular location. He’s also brought some of the cold roast beef and a wad of blankets; he has no idea whether the wolf will get any use out of the latter, but if nothing else they’ll help him to be comfortable while he waits. He lingered long over the question of whether to bring John’s blanket; he wants it desperately, but he can’t risk its ending up shredded, blood-stained, pissed on, or roast-beefy, so he’s left it upstairs. In the end, he went instead into John’s bedroom, intending to look for something that smelled of John and wouldn’t be missed. It was his nose that led him to John’s laundry hamper, where the strongest-smelling items, predictably enough, were John’s underthings. The briefs would have been best, but some lingering sense of propriety gave him pause, and he settled for a plain white t-shirt, a bit old, unwashed, and slightly yellow about the underarms. He has that item with him now, crumpled in his hand as he bolts the door and turns to survey his...prison.

It is a grim place. He remembers looking at it when he first came to see Mrs. Hudson about lodgings. The floorplan is awkward in the usual way of converted basements; there’s a front room with a fireplace, which Mrs. Hudson advertises as the bedroom, a central room with no windows of its own, which serves as a squalid sort of living area, and a kitchen and bathroom at the back. The ceilings are low and the windows small; the pressed-tin ceiling panels look corroded, and dampness creeps in darkly at the corners. Industrial strength wall-to-wall carpet covers the floors, grey as moon-rock.

It’s getting dark outside. Sherlock shuts himself into the central room, with its single grimy overhead light fixture, and waits. 

***

John and Harry have a quiet evening in. They watch a movie, a crime thriller that Harry picked out. John wonders what Sherlock would make of it. Afterward, they sit up talking. Harry asks John about his love-life, and John ends up listing his various girlfriends and how Sherlock drove each of them away. He was annoyed at the time, but now it seems funny: the crazy situations, the cutting (but accurate) deductions, the unfounded jealousy. Since Harry can’t do beers, they’re drinking coke with ice and lemon wedges (“to make it properly fancy,” Harry says), and before too long they’re giggling like a couple of fools. He’d forgotten how much he enjoys Harry’s company when she isn’t drinking.

“So then there was Abigail. That’ pretty recent, really. Just about a month back. Cool girl, really cool. She’s going places.” 

“Ooh, a _cool_ girl. Must have been smart.”

“Yep. Scientist. Did stuff with insects.”

“So what happened with her?”

“Well, we. Well. I broke it off, actually.” John sobers as he catches sight of the tree that their conversation is about to crash into. He feels sort of suicidally glad, though; at least it’ll be out in the open.

“Oh no, why? Seems a cruel fate for a cool girl.”

“Yeah, it was. I don’t feel good about it. But. I just realized I’d rather go home.”

“To Sherlock.”

“Yeah.” John sinks a bit lower into the couch.

“John.” Harry’s giving him a rather sharp look, and he steels himself. “We’ve been talking about Sherlock for over two hours. Do you fancy _him?_ ”

John swallows before answering. “Yeah. Yeah, I reckon I do.”

Harry watches him for several seconds, then says, in a completely different tone, “All right. Who are you and what have you done with my brother?”

“Sorry, what?”

“You heard me. You’re pining for him, obviously, and my brother, John ‘Three Continents’ Watson, Scourge of Afghanistan, Terror of the London Club Scene, does not pine. You fancy a bloke, and he tells you to bugger off so he can have a lousy shag with some person or persons unknown, and you just say, ‘oh, all right, I’ll go and visit my wretched alcoholic sister’? Not a chance. I’m not having it. One might almost think you were afraid.”

John bristles. “God, Harry! It’s not...I mean...he’s a _man_ , Harry.” 

She glowers at him. “Your point?”

“Oh, christ, you know what I mean.”

“I do. I do know what you mean. But, John, what do you think is going to happen if you don’t say something? I do read your blog, you know; it doesn’t sound as though you can expect _him_ to make any advances. If you like him, you ought to let him know.” 

“No, but...I mean...I’m not even sure if he’s gay. Or if he’s even capable of those kinds of feelings at all.” Now that they’re talking about it, it’s surprisingly easy. Harry leans on her elbow and wrinkles her brow as though working on a puzzle.

“All right,” she says. “But please consider this: unless your habits have changed lately, he definitely thinks you’re completely straight. Suppose he _does_ fancy you. What sort of position does that put him in, then? If he shows any sign of attraction, in his mind, rejection is guaranteed. He probably thinks you won’t even be his friend anymore. So, naturally, if there is anything there, he’ll be working to hide it. Honestly, the fact that you don’t know even know _what_ he likes makes me think he feels he has a reason to hide it from you.”

“I...hadn’t thought of that.”

“And in that case, don’t you think that it falls to you, as the nominally straight person in this putative relationship, to make the first move?”

Harry’s practically crowing with her triumph of logic. John just looks at her for a moment before his mouth quirks up in a half-smile. 

“What, is that in the rules, then?”

“Oh, yes. There’s a handbook. They give it to you at the sexual orientation orientation.”

John snorts a laugh. “God, I could use one of those. But really, Harry, you’re still assuming that he actually _is_ gay.”

“Oh, sod it, he probably is. Everybody says so. Look at his posh bloody wardrobe. Look at his hair. Look at his oh-so-snoggable lips. Yes, I’ve definitely decided. You’re telling him. Tonight! As soon as possible!”

“But Harry--”

“Nope, I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind, you can’t sleep here. You’ll have to go home and tell him.”

“ _Harry_. Would you listen? He has someone over.”

“All the better! You can sweep in dramatically and make a scene, the unworthy lover thrown aside as he swoons in the face of your fiery passion. I saw it in a film once. ‘s brilliant.” She’s having him on now, laughing, but he still feels a bit red about the ears, and says nothing.

“Seriously, though. You should tell him. Like, immediately. It’s obvious. None of this ‘will you please leave the flat’ nonsense; it’s bollocks.”

“But, Harry, what if--”

“Don’t you ‘but Harry’ me. You’re John bloody Hamish Watson. If there’s a gay bone in his body, he’s--” She dissolves into laughter. “Oh, god, forget I said that, about the bone. My point is, he likes you. I’m sure of it.” 

***

Sherlock is beginning to feel that the basement flat was not such a good idea after all; he ought to get out while he still has hands. He shouldn’t be here, in this mouldy old flat, smelling of nobody and nothing of interest. He should be _out_ , running, under the sky, under the moon. To find a pack, to hunt, to cry--

 _No_. He burrows face-first into his blanket-nest, which smells comfortingly of himself, his territory. He mustn’t leave here, he must stay, so that he can be safe. So that John can be safe. Sherlock raises John’s shirt to his face and inhales deeply, and the smell is pleasantly overwhelming, symphonic, alive with different traces he can follow. He wonders what day it was that John wore this shirt; he can pick up traces of things outside of John: medical antiseptic, tobacco smoke, car exhaust, curry. _Deduction_. Oh, if only he could have this nose all the time! He could learn so much. He’s never even realized how many different sorts of sweat there are: nervous sweat, exertion sweat, arousal sweat. _God_. He can smell that. John had an orgasm while wearing this shirt; there’s a particular bright and tangy note, especially about the small of the back, that tells him so. The knowledge sends a molten shock of helpless want through all the limbs of his body to pool low in his abdomen, and he moans. The feeling connects up to something buried deep within him, and suddenly he’s looking at a pair of boy’s trainers, which he last saw in this very basement.

Carl Powers. Where he began. Sherlock was fourteen, and competing on the school swim team (he’d been a good swimmer, actually; he’d found the physical training beneficial to his mental focus). Carl--blond, strong, brashly charismatic--was visiting from another school. As the wolf-mind catches hold of these images, all the feelings of that long, awful day come back to him: the chill of the pool, the physical exhaustion, the helpless, shaming desire, and then--oh, then the sick dread, as realization filtered through the assembled crowd. The first time he felt desire, the first time he saw violent death, and the Wolf is with him now, no question, and it’s drawing a ghastly parallel, showing him to himself, sick, _sick_ , and getting sicker. And Carl wasn’t the only person he loved who died, _oh no, Sherlock, your bite is poison, your touch is death._

Later he’ll know it’s a lie, but now, _now_ , it is his universe, and he’s changing, he can _feel_ the change, the physical reshaping, but the musculoskeletal convulsions are nothing compared to the way the Wolf runs wild in the halls of his mind, jumbling feelings and memories together, wreaking such mischief that he can only pray, before the last trace of his humanity disintegrates, that he may be allowed to forget this night after it’s over. Assuming, of course, that it ever will end...

***

It’s not that Harry’s arguments have quite convinced him, but when it’s thee A.M. and he’s had three cokes with lemon, John finds he’s just a bit too keyed up to actually go to sleep on Harry’s couch, which is anyway ridiculously uncomfortable. He tosses and turns for half an hour, listening to a ticking clock, a running toilet, the sounds a refrigerator makes when it thinks no one is listening; then he reaches a decision. He’d really rather be home, and it’s only an hour and a half away. It’ll be more or less morning by then, so he will have technically let Sherlock have the flat to himself all night, and he should be able to just quietly slip upstairs and into his own bed with nobody the wiser. Sherlock will probably be asleep, and if he isn’t--well. Maybe that would be good, in a way.

He gets up and scrawls a quick note for Harry (which he knows she’ll tease him about later), then gets in his rental car. The roads are dead quiet at this hour, the dark lawns and pale house-fronts of Harry’s suburban neighborhood lit blue by the lowering moon. As he drives, John’s mind presents him with images of the scene that may await him at home. What if Sherlock and his...guest...are up and about, and John’s about to walk into something awkward? Or what if they’re asleep in Sherlock’s bed, folded together like the pages of a letter? He can’t decide which would be worse. What if he could have prevented this by speaking up sooner? What if he’s lost his only chance?

He tries to picture who the other person might be, but draws a complete blank. Surely nobody John has met. He imagines someone not at all like himself, someone willowy and sharp, like Sherlock, someone Sherlock might find interesting. For a stomach-lurching second he thinks of Jim Moriarty, but _that_ , he knows, is unfair, just paranoia talking. Or Irene Adler? But no, she’s dead, dead and gone. Most likely.

His thoughts are getting out of hand. All he can do is say his piece, and see what happens.

Just outside of London, he runs into traffic on the M-23, a long line of late-night lorries lined up at a near stand-still. He has plenty of time to start feeling stupid for making this drive at all before he finally crawls past the source of the congestion, a lane closure at a road construction site. By then it’s nearly dawn, and he gets the car parked just as the sky is lightening from orange-black to pearl gray, and lets himself into the building as quietly as he can.

If he weren’t trying to be quiet, he might not have heard it at all: a muffled thump coming from the basement. It’s too loud, too solid, to be his imagination. He starts down the stairs, meaning to investigate, when another sound stops him in his tracks. It’s not a scream, not a growl, but something in between, and it raises the hairs on the back of John’s neck. More thumping follows, and John creeps onward, listening, trying not to breathe too loudly. He comes to the door of the basement flat, and listens. Nothing. He puts his hand to the doorknob, feeling the abortive _click_ as the lock keeps it from turning. He lets out a slow breath--

\--then jumps backward as something _slams_ into the door, with a slavering snarl that sends his heart racing. 

Okay. Well. He’s equipped for this. He goes upstairs.

“Sherlock!” he calls, as he enters their flat. There’s no answer, but he doesn’t actually fancy doing this by himself. He opens Sherlock’s bedroom door, forgetting in the adrenaline of the moment what it was he feared to find there, but the bed is empty. 

“Okay,” he breathes. “All right.” He doesn’t actually have the first clue what’s going on, but it’s definitely _something_ and it’s _not good_ , and finding Sherlock not in the flat is alarming in a whole new way. Opening his dresser drawer, he pulls out the SIG, checks and loads it with blind efficiency. He goes back down to stand in front of the basement flat door, the gun raised in front of him. 

“All right,” he says, then raises his voice. “All right. I don’t know who you are, but I have a gun and I’m prepared to use it. Come out with your hands up, or I will come in after you.”

His speech receives no answer, not even a thump. He waits.

“Sherlock?” he calls. Again, no answer. His hands are steady but slick on the textured grip of the pistol.

He’s just getting ready to try and kick down the door when the lock clicks open. The knob turns, and the door swings slowly open. John stays steady, training the gun on the space where _whatever it is_ is going to appear. Movement. It’s a pale figure. It’s a naked man. It’s...Sherlock Holmes.

John’s mind barely has time to register the confused, exhausted look on Sherlock’s face before he’s lunging through the doorway, shouldering Sherlock behind him as he whirls defensively, rapidly quartering the room with his gun. The entryway is clear, so he moves onward, checking the flat’s four rooms with tense efficiency. Finding a pile of bedclothes, he kicks through it, ready for an ambush, but there’s nothing there except a white t-shirt. The flat is empty. John goes around three times just to be sure, checking every closet, and even the kitchen cupboards. Nothing. 

Sherlock’s gone when he comes out, still twitching. He ascends the stairs sideways, defending both above and below, then gives their own flat the same treatment. When he gets to his own room, he finds Sherlock huddled up on his bed, sitting upright with the blankets wrapped around him like a cloak.

“Sherlock, what the hell is going on?”

“You can put the gun away, John.” Sherlock’s voice sounds thick and nasal. “There’s nothing to shoot.” 

John takes a few deep breaths, then obeys, clicking on the safety and laying the gun on top of the dresser. He turns back to Sherlock. He looks vulnerable, his pale face small and gaunt within the swaddling pyramid of blankets. 

“What was that thing?” John asks. “I heard something. Something not...normal. Not human.”

“I’ll explain, John. I will explain. But not just this moment, if you don’t mind.” 

“I do mind, actually,” John says. Anger wells up in him, hard on the heels of fear. “You’re keeping enough secrets, with that business a month ago, and asking me to leave the flat, and now this. Dammit, Sherlock, I’m your friend, but I can’t bloody do it if you won’t tell me what’s going on.”

Sherlock closes his eyes. “I can’t, John. Right now I just can’t.” His voice sounds so small and broken that John is forced to believe him. Whatever is going on, it’s obviously taken Sherlock to the limits of his strength. John blows out his breath, wills his heart to stop pounding. 

“Will you at least tell me why you’re in my bed?” he asks. 

“Mine doesn’t have any blankets on it.” 

“Oh,” says John. He waits for an explanation, but gets none.

“You can sleep in it anyway,” Sherlock says. “You’ve clearly been awake all night. And I’d rather...not be alone.” 

It’s the closest Sherlock has ever come to asking him for help. Still...

“Are you on drugs?”

“No, John, I am not.” 

“Right.” 

John dithers a bit over what to wear, eventually settling on a t-shirt and boxers. Meanwhile, Sherlock rearranges the bedclothes into their normal configuration. John slides into bed, not knowing what to expect, then gasps as Sherlock’s long limbs wrap around him, solid and cold. Sherlock closes his eyes tightly and burrows against John’s chest, taking deep, desperate breaths that he blows out through his nose as though willing himself to calm. He is so close, and so naked, and all John can do is hold him as he shivers and shudders his way to fitful sleep.


	5. Don't Look Away

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is still not the end. I'm just going to stop making promises.

John wakes up first, at some indeterminate hour of the afternoon. He can’t look at his clock because it’s behind him, and he’s still tangled up with the sleeping Sherlock. Sighing, John gets his arms more firmly around his friend and rests his cheek in Sherlock’s hair. He smells of sweat and terror, a smell that takes John back to the war, and his heart clenches to find it here. What has happened to him? As much as John has wanted this, Sherlock’s nearness, his trust, still he would rather not have it if Sherlock’s suffering is the price. 

Sherlock awakens without even a twitch, so that John nearly jumps out of his skin at the sound of his voice.

“Why did you come back?” His voice is controlled, but John thinks he can detect a note of accusation.

“Why did you send me away?” he counters, letting his frustration show. 

“Because I needed to be alone.”

“You made me think you were having someone over.”

“Indeed. I let you think I was having a sexual liaison because that seemed like an effective way to have you out of the house until at least mid-morning. That’s the sort of thing flat-mates do for each other, isn’t it? You’d never willingly defy convention and risk embarrassment by coming home too early. Therefore you must have had some compelling reason to return. What was it?”

“But aren’t you glad I did? God, Sherlock, I don’t know what was happening, which, by the way, you have promised to tell me, but it seems to me it’s a good I thing I showed up. You were in trouble.”

“I wasn’t in trouble. I could have dealt with it alone.”

Resentment wells up in John, until he realizes that Sherlock is delivering this nonsense from within the circle of his arms. 

“Would you rather be alone now?”

A beat passes, and another, before Sherlock lets out his breath. “No,” he says. He sounds so petulant that John chuckles, the motion shaking Sherlock gently.

“Thought not.”

They lie still for a while. John feels no inclination to move.

“You don’t seem to mind this,” Sherlock says.

“I don’t,” John says. “But it drives me mad that you won’t tell me what happened. I mind that very much.”

“Why do you?” Sherlock asks. 

Half of John wants to berate Sherlock for being that much of a fool, but the other half feels terribly sad that he should have to ask such a question. Another case of Sherlock’s spectacular ignorance.

“Because I am your friend, Sherlock.” He inhales Sherlock’s scent, and tries not to think about being more. “I want you to be well, and happy, and I want to do whatever I can to make that happen. If you won’t let me help you, you are depriving me of...of my purpose, as your friend. I get so much from you, Sherlock. I owe you so much. I want to give back.”

“Is that all it is? A commercial exchange? You feel indebted to me, and you can’t rest until we’re even?”

“No, god, Sherlock, that’s not all it is. You know it’s not.” He bites his lip for moment, deciding. He almost feels he shouldn’t go on, but there’s something beneath the porcupine-quills of Sherlock’s words, a heart-deep bitterness that he can’t _not_ answer. “I’m in love with you, actually. That’s why I came back.”

Sherlock had been chewing abstractedly on his thumbnail, but now he goes still against John’s chest. A long moment passes, long enough for John to realize what a colossally bad time it is to try to make this kind of connection with Sherlock. He’s just about to say something to negate it--he’s not sure what--when Sherlock presses his face against John’s chest, and says something he can’t quite hear. 

“Sorry, what?” John says. “You’re a what?”

“A werewolf, John. A _were. Wolf._ ” Sherlock pushes up on his hands to look John in the eye, gaze challenging. John blinks a few times, trying to process this bizarre statement.

“Is that--some kind of a metaphor? What do you mean?”

“It’s _not_ a metaphor.” Sherlock leaps out of the bed to pace around the room. “I’m a literal, actual werewolf. Two months ago, on a full moon night, I was bitten by that so-called dog.” He gestures to his scarred arm. “It passed some sort of pathogen to me, and on each full moon since then, I have transformed into a wild beast. I have no control of my faculties in that state. A month ago it took me by surprise, and I wrecked the flat. That’s why you haven’t been able to find your RMC mug: the wolf smashed it. Last night I knew it was coming, so I sent you and Mrs. Hudson away and locked myself in flat C, where I’d do less damage. You came home and found me immediately after I transformed back to human. That is why I was so reduced and emotional.” He turns to look at John, looming over him where he lies in the bed, feeling stunned. “ _That_ is what’s going on, John. _That_ is what I haven’t told you. Are you happy now?”

He waits for an answer, but John can only stare at him, stunned.

“You don’t believe me.”

“It’s. Well.” Sherlock glares at him, but John feels as though his brain has sprung a gear. “It’s just hard to believe, you know?”

“Nonetheless, John, it is the truth. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and eat a bloody sandwich.”

He whirls and leaves the room. John doesn’t move for some minutes; he can hear Sherlock clattering about in the kitchen. _That_ , says a small voice, _did not go well._ John told Sherlock he was in love with him, and Sherlock reacted...well, almost angrily, with this very strange and patently false explanation of his actions. What is he trying to do? It’s like he’s pushing John away, but god, John thinks, why not just say “I don’t feel that way about you” like a normal person would?

So whatever is going on with Sherlock, it’s obviously complicated. Perhaps he’s gone mad, perhaps he’s been drugged, perhaps he’s being fooled by someone, somehow. Whatever it is, John is going to have to put his personal feelings aside to help him through it. Sherlock is clearly in no shape to reciprocate right now, and it would be selfish to want him to. 

John feels chilly in his suddenly empty bed. Sighing, he wraps himself tighter in his blankets, and tries to come up with a plan to figure out what’s really happening to Sherlock.

***

Sherlock tears savagely at his roast beef sandwich, if you can call an inch-thick piece of red meat between two slices of flimsy white bread a sandwich. He has to hold the thing tightly to tear off each bite, and his fingers have sunk into the bread to form a series of pink divots that are rapidly disintegrating. Soon the bread will fall apart and he’ll just be eating half-raw meat with his hands. But that’s just life around here these days. He pauses to guzzle some of the orange-colored sports drink straight out of its plastic bottle. It’s vile, wretched stuff, but just at this moment it tastes wonderful, an effect you only get when your body is exhausted, desperately craving electrolytes. 

God, things have gone really wrong. He tries to focus on eating to shut out the other things, the sound of John’s words echoing again and again in his mind. Oh, its wrong, it’s all so wretchedly _wrong_. Why did John have to say that just then, just at that moment when Sherlock was starting to feel barely human again, when he was just starting to sort out the damage the Wolf had done?

Because this time he remembers, oh yes, he does. He remembers the change, he remembers the pain, he remembers the way the gray surfaces of his prison came alive with new, unnameable colors. He remembers thinking about Carl Powers and wanting to mount him and tear him to shreds, and wanting to tear himself to shreds. He remembers seeing James Moriarty in the guise of a wolf, huge, terrifying, making Sherlock cringe, making him _submit_ , making the blackness inside him rise up and strike out at John, at Mycroft, at his long-dead mother and father. The Wolf would have them all, and revel in it. The Wolf has no nobility about it, no chance of being humanized by loyalty or love. Near dawn, when he heard John’s tread on the stairs, the Wolf was filled with rage at the nearness of its enemy. It wanted the smell of his fear, the taste of his blood, the feel of his flesh tearing. The Wolf will have John Watson, if it can.

Afterward, Sherlock held onto John in defiance of the Wolf. _You see_ , he thought, _you see, I can be close to him, I will not hurt him. We are not the same creature. He is safe from you._

But Sherlock was fragile, still, and when John spoke, oh, when he said _I’m in love with you_ , the Wolf opened its eyes. Then Sherlock knew that John would never be safe from him, because the Wolf was in him and had always been in him and would be in him for evermore. He couldn’t leave John helpless against it. So he told John the truth.

What was he expecting? Well. He expected disbelief. He expected John to call him a liar, or mad. John hasn’t done that yet, but it’s only a matter of time. He expects John will leave him, eventually, and that will be good, an answer to his problem. He tries to hope for it, there in the kitchen with the taste of a dead animal heavy on his tongue. But the thing he feels is not much like hope at all.

Sherlock is near the end of his second sandwich when John comes downstairs. John sits down across from him and watches him eat. When Sherlock finishes his sandwich and moves on to the chocolate course, John’s expression of mild interest turns to surprise.

“I’ve never seen you do that before,” he says.

“Do what?” Sherlock asks.

“Put food away like that. Especially candy.”

“Indeed,” Sherlock replies, mouth full. “It seems to be a side effect of my condition. The reshaping of my body uses up quite a few calories. Both incidents have left me ravenous.”

John rolls his eyes. “Sherlock, you’ll never convince me that you’ve become a werewolf. It simply isn’t possible.”

“Two months ago I would have said the same. And yet, here we are.” 

“But what--Sherlock, how can you be sure? What evidence do you have?”

“I have the evidence of my senses. Is that not sufficient?”

“Maybe not. You could have been hallucinating; you’ve been drugged, or--”

“Yes, obviously, I did consider that, but blood tests revealed nothing. And don’t forget, you heard the thing yourself, or so I assume from the fact that you were upset enough last night to brandish a pistol at the door of Mrs. Hudson’s derelict basement flat. What did you hear, John? And if you heard something that wasn’t me, where do you suppose it went?”

John swallows, looking a little pale. Sherlock knows that he’s slipping into an aggressive tone, but just now he can’t be bothered with sparing John’s feelings. John needs to believe it; and if he won’t believe it, he needs to stop thinking of Sherlock as his friend...or anything else. 

“It could have gone out a window,” John says. “Or it could have gotten out when I went upstairs for the gun.”

“Point A, the windows are barred, and you’ll find that the bars remain intact. Point B, why would it run away and leave me behind to tell the tale? Point C, and most telling, you’re already referring to it as _it_. Which means that even if you don’t believe it was what I say it was, you don’t believe it was human, either. What do you think it was, John? A tiger escaped from the zoo?”

“I don’t know.” John rubs his hand through his hair. “You’re right that it didn’t sound human. But...aren’t you the one who’s always giving that speech about eliminating the impossible, and the improbable being true?”

“In this case, John, I have eliminated both the probable and the improbable. The only option, at this point, is to revise our estimation of the impossible.”

“All right.” John sighs. “All right. So assuming that what you say is true--and I’m not saying I believe it, but just for the sake of argument--if it is true, then what happens next?”

Sherlock is just opening his mouth to reply when his phone rings: Mycroft. Of course. Sherlock takes the phone into his bedroom and closes the door.

“Good afternoon, Sherlock. I presume everyone survived the night with life and limb intact?” Mycroft’s voice is calm, but dead serious.

“So it would seem.”

“Good. And no unwelcome visitors?”

A chill travels down Sherlock’s spine. 

“What do you mean? _Oh._ Dr. Flannagan’s people.”

“Just so. Sherlock, listen to me carefully. You should know that I am actively protecting you--it is you, isn’t it? Not John?”

Sherlock licks dry lips. “Yes.” 

“As I thought,” Mycroft goes on. “However, I am still outside of the country, and as such, my capabilities are limited. I can’t promise that you’ll continue to be left alone.”

“I see. And what do you suggest?”

He can almost hear the wry twist of Mycroft’s mouth as he answers. “Don’t get shot. I should be able to arrange a more sustainable solution for you, but not before the next full moon.”

“I understand.”

He’s trembling with anger when he disconnects the call. Some part of him knows that he shouldn’t, that he should be thankful to have someone so powerful on his side. And yet what he really wants to do is throw his telephone out of the nearest window. He settles for setting it down hard on the table.

“What is it?” John asks.

“I’m going to have a shower.” 

He stalks off to the bathroom, leaving John to wonder. He still feels exhausted, his head jumbled. Threads of the wolf-mind still linger, making it difficult to sort through his thoughts. Or, no, not his thoughts: his feelings. The wolf is about feelings. He can think, but the thoughts have emotions sticking to them like bits of mucous, sticking them together in unexpected ways. 

He turns on the shower, and lets the hot droplets sting him as he works. Mycroft, his brother, oh, his damnable _brother_ , as brilliant as Sherlock and so much better at the game of life. Sherlock needs his help, but he doesn’t want it because he feels... _envious_. It’s ridiculous, actually; who would envy Mycroft, that fat meddler, that toad of convention, so superior with his presumptuous, unwanted offers of help? And yet, there it is, he can’t deny it: Mycroft, who had their parents’ love for longer than Sherlock did, whose formative years were normal, unmarred by the tragedy of death, letting him slide into his adult life with sickening, unruffled ease. Sherlock hadn’t even known he wanted that, but here it is, he does, he hates that Mycroft had it and he didn’t, hates that Mycroft has never been lonely or heart-sick or aimless or queer or addicted. The knowledge shocks him; it clashes with who he thought he was, the principles he thought he’d built his life around. His eyes sting with it, and his guts twist, but...might it, somehow, be good to know that he feels this way? It feels like that, like it might be good, like he’s getting somewhere, although it’s not a place he knew he was trying to go. 

He leans his face against the cold tiles, breathing steam. Where was he? Mycroft. Mycroft knows that Sherlock was bitten; if he’s honest with himself, Sherlock knew he would figure it out from their first conversation. The hunters, whoever they are, are after Sherlock, and that’s fine, because dear, horrible Mycroft can pull strings and keep Sherlock free. All he has to do is not get shot in the meantime, and also keep John safe.

John. The thought of him is also sticky with emotion, but it’s not the wolf’s feelings, this time, only his own. And oh, his own are quite enough for the moment, thank you. John, who is in love with him. It’s a disaster. It cannot be allowed. And yet, somehow, he feels like singing. A fragment of a concerto escapes his lips as he picks up the flannel and starts to scrub. He has things to get on with, after all. The first step is to make John believe it.

***

While Sherlock showers, John goes to look at flat C. It’s dark, at first, until he starts pulling the thick wool army-surplus blankets down off of the windows. The watery light of a london afternoon filters in, giving him illumination for a more leisurely look around than he was able to manage last night. He’s not sure what he expects to find, but Sherlock isn’t the only one who can make deductions. 

The blanketed windows, first of all. What about them? John is sure they weren’t here the first time he came down, during Moriarty’s awful little game. So they must have been put up in preparation for...whatever happened down here during the night. Okay. So it was something premeditated, not a surprise. But then, he already knew that, because Sherlock had sent him and Mrs. Hudson away. So Sherlock had been planning to come down here and do something, and he wanted privacy. That’s weird, but it makes sense. It’s consistent with what he already knows.

One of the blankets is in bad shape, vertically slashed and half pulled-down, as though...what? His brow wrinkles as he touches a place where the edge of the blanket’s been pulled away from the wall, staples dangling. The plaster at that edge is deeply gouged, as though by some sharp tool. Odd. He didn’t see anything of that sort lying around last night, and he certainly would have noticed anything that looked like a potential weapon.

He circles through the flat slowly, methodically, looking for details. There are more gouges around the front door, around the jambs and scratched into the door itself. All right. He reserves judgment on those.

In the middle room, the living room, he finds more gouges in the walls, deep vertical ruts in sets of four. Again, they’re most pronounced around the door to the front room, and in this case it looks as though thing that made them actually succeeded in prying the flimsy door open. Also in this room he finds Sherlock’s duvet in its dark blue cover. He dimly recalls seeing it there before, curled up in a kind of nest shape. Now it’s all askew from when John kicked it aside. John picks it up, sighing, thinking he’ll bring it upstairs so that Sherlock can go back to sleeping in his own bed, when out falls a plain white t-shirt. John picks that up as well, shaking it out to examine it. It’s fairly ripe-smelling and a little damp and crumpled, but otherwise not in bad shape. It’s the same brand as the ones he buys, but he can’t be sure it’s his own until he notices a small brown stain just below the collar. He’s never been sure what that stain came from, but it tends to keep this particular shirt at the bottom of the rotation. It’s definitely one of his.

So. Sherlock sent everyone away, stapled blankets over the windows, brought down his duvet, one of John’s shirts, and a sharp tool, then locked himself in and proceeded to gouge away at the walls, doors, and windows. Obviously. John takes a deep breath as frustration creeps over him; he’d been so certain he could sort it out, but he can’t escape the conclusion that this is the behavior of a madman. 

Unless he wasn’t alone. What if, maybe, Sherlock had been expecting someone, had prepared the place, but then the visit hadn’t gone as planned? But, christ, prepared the place for what? Some kind of seedy BDSM scene? Oh, god, what if the visit _had_ gone as planned and John had just bumbled into it? It still wouldn’t explain much of anything, but at least that would just be Sherlock being Sherlock, inscrutable as ever.

But...Sherlock was not all right. He was not well when John found him, was not himself. Something bad happened to him, something John needs to stop from happening again. 

When he gets back upstairs, Sherlock is wrapped in his blue dressing-gown, curled up on the sofa with his laptop. He looks up when John comes in.

“Ah, tampering with the evidence, I see. Please don’t put that back on my bed, it needs washing.” 

John dumps the duvet on the floor of Sherlock’s bedroom, then comes to sit across from Sherlock, the white shirt crumpled up in his hand. Sherlock’s eyes flick to it briefly.

“Well,” he says, gaze challenging, “have you reached any conclusions?”

“Sherlock.” John steels himself. “Were you raped?”

“Oh, don’t be thick, of course not. I’ve already told you what’s been happening.” He doesn’t lift his eyes form his laptop, but John doesn’t answer, just stares at him until he looks up.

“Do you have an alternative theory to offer?” Sarcasm drips from Sherlock’s voice, but John doesn’t rise to it.

“No,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean I believe that you’re a werewolf.”

“You will.” Sherlock goes back to the screen, and for a moment John just sits there, at a loss. Then Sherlock says, “I see you found your shirt.”

“I did, yeah.” John feels his cheeks turn red, for some reason. “Sherlock, why did you...?”

“I like the way you smell. I find it...soothing.”

Sherlock meets John’s eyes, and for a long moment John gapes like a fish out of water, trying to figure out how to respond to this assertion. It’s certainly the oddest compliment he’s ever received, but the thought of Sherlock alone in a dark room huffing his underthings does strange things to him. 

He’s saved from having to answer by a chime from Sherlock’s cellphone. 

“It’s Lestrade,” says Sherlock, reading the text. “There’s a case, finally. A murder! Hurry!”

With that he snaps the laptop closed and sweeps into his bedroom to change. John can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that if there’s one thing for which Sherlock would willingly step back form the brink of insanity, it is a properly satisfying murder case.


	6. Lighter Than Air

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Be warned that this chapter depicts the aftermath of a violent killing.
> 
> Also, I want to thank everyone who has offered encouragement on the story so far! It means a lot to me.

It’s so much better to have a case. The relief is almost a physical thing, as the labyrinth of the past few days narrows in his mind to a straight, white road, a path forward, a purpose. On the cab ride to the crime scene, Sherlock closes his eyes to focus on it, ignoring John, ignoring the wolf, drinking in that sweet relief.

The crime scene is in a university building, a research lab with an attached greenhouse. John’s breath catches as they approach, and Sherlock gives him a curious look.

“It’s the entomology lab,” John says. “I think this is where Abigail works.”

Sherlock only looks at him, thinking _why does that matter?_ but John looks uncomfortable enough that it clicks into place. His ex. Awkwardness. Of course.

“I see. If you need to wait outside, you can--”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll be fine. Let’s go.”

As it turns out, John needn’t have worried. Abigail slumps forward over a workbench, her mousy curls matted with gore, one hand turned up in a beam of late sunlight, bee tattoo just showing beneath the edge of a purple nitrile glove. Sherlock hears John’s breath do a certain thing that it does, draw in shaky and blow out smooth; his face looks bad. Without thinking, Sherlock steps in front of him to hide the scene from his eyes. John looks down, and Sherlock puts a hand on his shoulder, feels the warmth of his skin seeping through the wool of his jacket. He doesn’t know what to say.

“Do you need to leave?” 

John looks up at him, blinking fast. “No, I...no. I’ll be okay. Just give me a minute.” He looks like he needs more than a minute. Sherlock doesn’t move, even when Lestrade comes up to them.

“Everything all right?” he asks, glancing at John.

“John knew her,” Sherlock explains. 

“Oh, christ. I’m sorry. John, if you need to--”

“No, I’m fine.” John straightens, and his face is almost calm again, though Sherlock can see the way he compresses his lips more tightly than usual. “I’ve seen worse.”

Lestrade looks hard at the two of them for a moment, then nods.

“Right then. She was found by her labmate; he’s outside with Donovan, not a suspect as of now. Anderson reckons--”

“I don’t care what Anderson reckons,” Sherlock interrupts. “Give me five minutes. Alone.”

He turns, expecting to find John beside him, but John has already begun examining the body. It makes something loosen up in Sherlock’s chest; he’d been worried about John, but now he sees that he needn’t, that John’s instinct will never be to run away. He’d known that about John once; how did he forget?

Abigail Mason has four long, parallel cuts running vertically down her back, slashed through the fabric of her shirt: ugly, but not enough to kill her. Probably. 

“John?”

“Her throat’s been cut,” he says. “That’s what did it.”

“Those cuts on her back--were they made before or after death?”

“Before.” John swallows hard. “Not long before, though. And there are bruises: wrists, face, upper arms. They fought.”

“Definitely.” Sherlock examines her injuries as best he can without disturbing the scene. “More than one assailant, I should think. They cooperated.” His eyes take in other details: the wounds, all made with the same weapon, a blade, sharp, not serrated, wielded with the right hand from a position behind the victim; the four cruel gouges inflicted in quick succession, while someone held the victim’s arms in front of her; then, almost immediately, the slash across her throat. He can see where in the room it occurred, the messy gush of blood already cordoned off by the diligent Anderson. They posed her, afterward. Why? 

He looks around the room for anything else of interest, but there isn’t much: screen cages full of greenery and tiny living things, supply shelves, paperwork, a few things obviously disturbed by the struggle. 

John’s gaze is lingering on Abigail’s back. Why? _Oh_. John had a look around the basement flat, saw the marks of the Wolf’s--of Sherlock’s--claws upon the walls. Vertical slashes in sets of four. A coincidence? Maybe. Certainly no respectable forensic investigator would believe these wounds had been inflicted by the claws of an animal. But then there is the pose, slumped over on her front so that the wounds face the room, gaping open. 

Maybe it’s the thought of the Wolf that makes him do it: he leans over Abigail, over her neck where a broad bruise shows how a hand gripped her, briefly but brutally, and he inhales through his nose, smelling her. 

“Sherlock?” John asks, quiet, confused.

“Shh.” He is concentrating. Beneath the blood and terror of her death, he can smell her artificially fragrant shampoo, her bergamot-scented soap, her beeswax lip balm. She washed her clothes with unscented detergent. She had falafel for lunch. But here, just here, is a smell of tobacco, and not a cigarette: a cigar, cuban. Not a smell of smoke, but of the cured leaves, humid, oily, mixed with the oils of his hands. A trace of the killer. 

Once he’s gathered what he needs, Sherlock goes to speak with the labmate. His name is Christopher Jay, black, twenty-four, graduate student, avid bicyclist. Earlier today he was shopping for comic books. He still looks rather fragile and upset; Sherlock resolves to be gentle with him, maybe because John is there. He’s about to address the man when Christopher catches sight of John. His eyes light up with surprise, initial neutrality giving way to....something else. 

“John, right?” he says. “What are you doing here?”

John looks awkward. _Ah._ One of Abby’s friends, someone John’s met, may be antipathetic toward him in light of recent events. “Hello, Christopher, I’m just...helping with the investigation. This is Sherlock, he’s a detective.”

“Sherlock Holmes,” says Christopher. “Abby mentioned you.” 

Sherlock blinks. “In what context?”

“Context of her ex boyfriend, of course.” His eyes flick between them. “She used to say you were joined at the hip.” Again his gaze settles on John, suspicious, accusing. His shock makes his feelings look raw on his face. Enough of this. Sherlock cuts in.

“Did you know Abby well?” he asks. 

“Yeah,” says Christopher, “I think I did. We were _best mates_.” Another venomous look at John.

“Good. Which of her close relatives is missing?”

“Um.” Christopher blinks at him. “How did you--”

“Just answer the question.” He remembers that he was being gentle. “Please.”

“Yeah, Thomas. Her brother.”

“For how long?” 

“About two months,” he says. “Little less, maybe.”

“Lestrade?” Sherlock turns to the D.I. “Get me everything you have on that.”

Lestrade is just about to give the order when Christopher interrupts. “You won’t find anything in your missing person files. He told her not to call the police. He told her he was going, he just didn’t say where. Said he was lying low. She was really conflicted about it, didn’t know what to do. Told me not to tell anyone.” 

“Well, well,” Sherlock smirks. “It sounds as though we have a lead. John and I are going home; send me everything you’ve got about the brother.”

As they’re waiting for a taxi home, John asks Sherlock how he knew.

“It’s quite simple, really. The injuries to her back were inflicted deliberately, not as part of the struggle. Then her body was posed to prominently display the cuts. Those cuts were the whole point of the murder; they were a message for someone, but who? It had to be someone with a close emotional connection, someone who would be properly upset about her death. We know she didn’t have a romantic partner, so that leaves family. Why might you need to send a message to someone’s family, without them being there in person? Answer: because you can’t get hold of them otherwise; they’re in hiding. The only way to get their attention is to commit a certain style of grisly murder.” 

“Hmm,” says John. For once he looks thoughtful, doesn’t lavish Sherlock’s intellect with praise. “Those cuts, though...”

 _Oh. He mustn’t think that._ “John, I know you’re thinking about the basement. I hope you don’t imagine that--”

“No.” John’s voice is firm, and his hand darts out to grip Sherlock’s forearm briefly, surprising him. “No, obviously. They weren’t spaced the same, and they were made with a different weapon. Besides the fact that I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t kill one of my girlfriends. Not an ex, anyway.” This last is by way of a joke, and Sherlock smiles in spite of himself. “Still, though,” John goes on, “I do wonder if there’s some connection.”

“I’m perfectly certain there is,” Sherlock says, “but I don’t yet know what it is.”

The ride home passes in silence. Sherlock wants to think about the case, but his mind keeps wandering back to John. Is he all right? Sherlock sneaks a glance; he’s sitting with his hands braced on his knees, eyes closed, but not relaxed. Waiting for the ride to be over. Waiting to get home. Not good. 

She was only an ex-girlfriend, anyway, someone with whom John had already severed ties. Is John regretting that, now? Had he hoped they might get back together? Was he still in love with her? No, probably not; he should give John more credit. Their relationship is over, but his empathy still includes her; John’s vast, troublesome, irrepressible empathy. John even feels for strangers, so of course the murder of a close acquaintance would hit him particularly hard, regardless of their history. 

And really, it must have been an awful way to go: attacked, held, sliced open. Terrifying, painful. He shudders, and his throat closes; a physiological reaction to emotion. _Christ._ He hasn’t responded this way to a corpse in years and years. It must be the wolf. Maybe. 

On the way up the stairs to their flat, John stumbles, his right leg giving way. Sherlock catches him. 

“Sorry,” John says, breathless. “Little wobbly. It’s just the shock wearing off.” 

“Of course.” 

He manages the rest of the stairs on his own. Once home, John hangs up his coat, then turns, visibly drooping, toward the stairs up to his room. Sherlock can already see him up there, by himself, shivering...

“John.” John turns to look at him. He looks sad, and very tired. Sherlock touches his arm, then grips it, then pulls John into an embrace. John comes to him willingly, his arms snaking around Sherlock’s ribs to grip him as Sherlock encircles his shoulders. It feels good, close and natural, John’s forehead pressing into his shoulder, his hair under Sherlock’s chin. John breathes against him in the dark space they have created there. _I love you,_ Sherlock thinks. 

“John. I’m so terribly sorry.” 

“It’s all right.” It’s not, though; just something John says. They hug for some minutes, and Sherlock finds his hands doing unexpected things: smoothing the fabric over John’s shoulders, gently patting him. Where did they learn to do that? Finally John makes a small pushing motion, seeking release. Sherlock lets him draw away, and John looks up. His face is still troubled, but there’s a small kind of peace there, which warms him. 

“Thank you,” John says. Then he slips away, goes up the stairs. Sherlock stands there a moment longer, hands empty, feeling useless, then goes to google up the missing brother. 

***

John hasn’t flung himself down for a properly good cry in years, and he’s not about to start now, thank you, no matter how much it feels like the thing to do. No. He does want to be by himself, though. If Sherlock hugs him again he’ll break down, which he really doesn’t want to do. He takes a deep breath and lies down on his bed, stretches out his arms to shake off the feeling that Sherlock’s are still around him.

It’s weird, having a hierarchy of corpses. Strangers give him relatively little trouble, though of course any death is a bit sad. Evidence of violence and pain make it worse, but it’s part of the work when you’re with Sherlock Holmes, and he can handle it. Then there are patients, people you’ve tried to save, maybe even come to like; they die now and then, and of course it’s dismal, but it’s normal, it’s part of the work, and professionalism carries you through it, to a degree. Soldiers: their deaths are heart-deadening background noise, unless they were your comrades in arms, in which case it cuts deep, but at least you have the solace of collective grieving. And in war, of course, it is expected, which is not precisely a comfort, but it lessens the blow. 

That only leaves lovers and friends. Abigail was not precisely either, but she was a civilian in his mind, and he had held her body close to his, and had stood with her unchaperoned in the place where she lived. She was real to him, a complex person with a past and a future, and that makes her death real, a real loss, near enough to his heart to nick it with pain, regardless of what she had or had not been to him, in the end. 

John knows how he’s going to feel, and resigns himself to it ahead of time. It’s going to be a process: he’ll feel strangely blunted for a few days, and he’ll have to remember to eat; then he’ll feel sad for a while, and small things will remind him of her unexpectedly; she’ll move gradually further back in his thoughts, and perhaps he’ll wonder whether, if he had done something differently, she would have been somewhere else that day, wouldn’t have died; time will keep passing until, suddenly, he’ll realize he hasn’t thought of her in weeks. Then the process will be complete. She will have moved into the past. 

He wraps up in his blankets, which still smell of Sherlock. Was that only this morning? Strange. He lies still for a while. Perhaps he sleeps. 

A knock on the door rouses him, accompanied by Sherlock’s voice. “Dinner.”

Blinking at his clock, John is surprised at how late it’s gotten, nearly midnight. It’s been such a long, strange day. He isn’t hungry, but he knows he needs to eat something. He goes downstairs and gives his face a wash before joining Sherlock in the sitting room, where a plastic bag of Chinese takeaway sits opposite Sherlock on the worktable, its handles still tied shut. Sherlock is sitting there with his laptop open. His eyes flick up in greeting, but he says nothing.

The bag contains a dish of his favorite ginger chicken, rice, wontons. “Thanks,” says John. 

“Don’t mention it.”

“Are you having any?”

“No.” A pause. “Thank you.”

John eats. He was hungry, after all. Physiology. 

“Any luck with the brother?” 

“Strangely little, actually. Of course there are a number Thomas Masons, but none of them seem to be our man. He’s very well hidden.” 

Sherlock keeps mining for information while John eats. He finishes the food, but doesn’t feel like moving, so he just sits and watches Sherlock at work, the way his eyes dart over the screen, his fingers touching the keys with quick, negligent flicks as he navigates through whatever he’s looking at. Does Sherlock even read like normal people? Probably not. He probably reads one word in fifty and deduces the rest. The brilliant git. John smiles. 

“You ought to get some more sleep,” Sherlock says. 

“I will if you will.”

Sherlock looks at him, eyes rebellious but undeniably smudged with exhaustion. 

“You really do need rest,” John says. “After the night you had, and then the day. Christ. It’s a wonder either of us can stand on our feet. The case will still be there in the morning.” 

Without dropping his gaze, Sherlock snaps the laptop shut. He folds his hands over it, as if to demonstrate his obedience. His face is very serious.

“John,” he says, and there’s a new register in his voice, something that makes John swallow hard as Sherlock pauses. “What you said to me...earlier.” 

John’s heart flips over. This is the moment, and god, now that it’s upon him he wishes he’d never spoken its name. It is too terrifying. “Um. Yeah?”

“I do feel the same.” And now his gaze slides away, settling anywhere but John’s face. “It’s just that right now, I can’t...there’s too much--” His hands gesture helplessly. John understands.

“It’s all right,” he says. “It can wait. We can wait.” 

Sherlock still looks troubled, but John feels his own lips stretching into a smile, because Sherlock Holmes is telling him that there’s something there to wait for, after all. The tiny spark of hope in his breast kindles and spreads through him, melting him. Because he can’t do anything else, he stands and goes to Sherlock, who is still sitting on a stool, his head level with John’s. John lifts a hand to touch Sherlock’s jaw, tilts him, and John thinks he has never seen anything as lovely as Sherlock’s face in that moment: surprised and suddenly yearning. John leans in, and Sherlock meets him. The kiss is brief, a gentle touch of lips to lips. John doesn’t close his eyes, but Sherlock does, and when his eyes open again, they are dark, glistening, fixed on John with an intensity that shakes him to the core. But they are going to wait. John pulls away.

“Good night then,” he says.

“Good night, John.”


	7. Seeking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the looong wait for this one! The truth is that this part of the story is pushing me out of my comfort zone as a writer, so it's taking some extra effort to make it happen! 
> 
> On a similar note, if you like this story and would like to beta future chapters (or even this chapter), please get in touch with me on Tumblr or LJ, or leave a comment telling me how to contact you. I would really love to have someone to bounce things off of.

True to his word, Sherlock sleeps that night. He lies down in his bed and drifts in a kind of haze for a while before falling deeply asleep. He wakes at dawn, feeling rested and alert, and finds that he knows who killed abigail, at least in the abstract sense. It’s so obvious that he can’t believe it took him this long to put it together. Well, blame the emotional muddle of yesterday. All that remains is to produce the proof.

What to tell John? It’s a tricky business, between Abigail and the Wolf and the bloody British government. He’d like to keep John out of it, just slip under the radar and solve all these problems and present himself to John as a whole man when it’s all over. 

But John. Oh, John would hate it, would hate him for it, and Sherlock doesn’t want John to hate him, not ever. Sherlock bites back a small sound as the events of the previous evening come back to him. He said he wasn’t ready, and John said they could wait, and then John _kissed_ him. And then John said goodnight, but Sherlock was thinking _no no no more waiting, now now NOW_. But the moment escaped him. And now--what to do? How to even--?

He must tread so carefully. He must make sure that he is absolutely in his right mind. He must be honest, hide nothing, trust John--and at the same time, keep him. Keep from losing him, even as the Wolf gets stronger. He’s not sure it’s even possible.

He gets up, but it’s early yet, and John is still in bed. Lestrade is on the job, though; Sherlock’s phone buzzes.

“Lestrade.”

“You won’t like this,” Lestrade says. “I don’t like it either, but all the same: you’re off the case.”

“You’re joking.”

“I wish I were, but no. Orders from on high. You’re not to be involved.”

“I’m never _supposed_ to be involved, but it hasn’t stopped you before.”

“No.” There’s a frustrated pause. “But it’s been expressly forbidden this time, on pain of me and the whole team being sacked.”

“Any idea why? Or who?” Sherlock knows, though. 

“Not really. Chief Inspector tried to tell me it was because you’re too close to the case, with John being involved, but...”

“But you know that’s a lie.”

He can almost hear Lestrade wince. “Look, I’m not really at liberty to explain. You’re going to have to just drop it.”

“You know I have everything I need to continue the investigation on my own.”

“God, don’t I know it.” A frustrated sigh. “Just don’t expect me to send you any files, or anything. The met is handling this one on our own.”

Sherlock smiles tightly. “I’m certain you are, detective inspector. Best of luck.”

If Lestrade is surprised at Sherlock’s compliance, he doesn’t have time to say anything. Sherlock disconnects the call just as John comes down the stairs, looking rumpled but rested.

“What was all that?” he asks.

“Detective Inspector Lestrade informs me that we are officially off the case.” 

John blinks. “Officially?”

“Yes. Unofficially, however, we’re going to pay Abigail Mason a little posthumous visit.”

***

John has braced himself for trip to the morgue, so he’s surprised when Sherlock directs the cab to Abigail’s flat. 

“And why are we here?” John asks, as they step onto the pavement.

“We’re looking for a photograph. See if you can get one of the neighbors to let you into the front door; I’ll try the fire escape round back.”

So John waits until he sees someone coming down the stairs inside, then assumes an attitude of panicked pocket-searching. The young woman who comes out is nobody John’s seen before, but she doesn’t know her neighbors well enough to know he isn’t one of them, and lets him inside rather than appear suspicious. John wonders if she’d behave the same if she knew that one of the women in her building had been murdered the day before. 

John’s at the door of Abigail’s flat trying to jimmy the lock with a credit card when Sherlock opens it from the inside, and John goes in with him. He’s only been here a couple of times, but now he sees it through Sherlock’s eyes: a tiny place, oddly laid out, clearly part of a larger original flat that was subdivided by the landlord to increase profits. Abigail’s done well with it, though, put it together carefully so that it feels cozy rather than small. A good number of books, a batiked cotton bedspread, a potted philodendron twining over the curtain rod. It’s a graduate student’s house. It reminds John pleasantly of his own days as a student, actually; no wonder he liked her, or wanted her to like him. She was like a piece of lost youth. Too young for him, maybe. Probably. It feels like a million years ago already.

Sherlock touches his shoulder, making him jump.

“All right?” 

“Yeah,” John swallows. “Yeah, fine. A photograph, you said?”

“Yes. I want to find a picture of her brother. We need to be quick; the Met will be here before long.”

John has no desire to be caught by the police ransacking his dead ex-girlfriend’s flat, so he starts looking over the bookshelves while Sherlock opens the drawers of her desk.

It doesn’t take them long to find it at all: a thick 4x6 photo album with clear sleeve pages and a faux leather cover. Sherlock finds it in the top left drawer of her desk. The photos are all of a certain vintage, before digital cameras became ubiquitous: a young Abigail with her high school friends, her parents in front of the Taj Mahal, and one of adolescent Abigail standing proudly next to a young man in a brand new Cambridge doctoral robe. He is perhaps ten years older than she, and taller, but has the identical eyes and the same curly, unruly brown hair. Her brother, almost certainly. Sherlock slides the photo out of the plastic, leaving the rest. 

They go out casually through the front door without meeting any more of the building’s inhabitants. Instead of hailing a cab, Sherlock suggests they take the tube, and John is not surprised at all when Sherlock bypasses the nearest stop in favor of a nearby plaza where several homeless people are passing the morning. John stands awkwardly by as Sherlock engages one of them in a brief conversation, the photograph changing hands along with a fifty-pound note.

“That’s it, then?” John asks, afterward. “Are we just going to sit and wait for your homeless network to spot him?”

“Certainly not. He probably isn’t even in London. But we have another clue to chase down.”

John thinks a moment. “Cambridge,” he says.

“Precisely.” He gives John that look that means he isn’t quite as thick as the rest of humanity, and it feels quite a bit better than it should. John likes Sherlock this way, focused and cool. The work has a rhythm that calms him, lets him forget about Abigail’s death, about Sherlock’s problem, about the hovering, invisible _thing_ between them. They have a job to do, and they are doing it. John thinks he understands Sherlock in moments like this. Married to his work, and why not? The work is clean, the work is orderly. Emotions fall away into the background. 

That mood holds for the next few days. Sherlock finds out Thomas Mason’s graduation year and field (biochemical engineering). From there, John is able to call in a favor with an old friend to find out where he was hired out of school: a research position in a government-sponsored lab. The nature of his work is classified, but Sherlock is able to track his next two career moves, first up and then laterally into a government department, overseeing the allocation of funding to research projects, again classified. After that he just...disappears. 

John is reading the paper when Sherlock finally gives up, slamming his hands on the desk loudly enough to make John jump. 

“Nothing!” he shouts. “It just isn’t here.”

He’s hacked into a database of government employee records, and has been fishing around in it for hours.

“I found the record of his leaving one department two years ago, and a note that it was an internal transfer, but I can’t find any evidence of his starting up anywhere else.”

John gives the question some thought. “Maybe your database doesn’t cover all the departments?”

Sherlock snorts. “It covers all the _official_ departments. Just means we’ll have to dig deeper.”

And so begins Sherlock’s intensive investigation into government budgets. John would never have believed him capable of it, but it appears that Sherlock’s head is as good for figures as it is for everything else. While John spends his days at the surgery, Sherlock pores over records of government spending, following the money from department to department, looking for discrepancies that would suggest a secret project. Occasionally he references a gigantic, cheaply-printed volume entitled _Quick Reference Guide to Generally Accepted Accounting Procedures_ ; flipping this causally open one evening, John finds his head swimming within minutes. It’s not that he’s so very bad at maths, but the section on depreciation alone is enough to make parts of his brain shut down in pure self-defense. 

“Um, Sherlock?”

“Yes?” He doesn’t look up from his columns of numbers.

“Isn’t this all rather...boring?”

Sherlock slumps forward a little, a kind of physical pout. “John. It is incredibly, monumentally, _spectacularly_ boring. And I’ll thank you not to remind me of that fact.” 

“So...why are you doing this?”

“For the case, obviously. If I can figure out where Thomas Mason’s salary came from, then I’ll know who his superiors were, and thus who was responsible for Abigail’s death.”

“You think Thomas Mason’s boss killed Abigail?”

“Yes, almost certainly.” 

John waits a beat to see if Sherlock will explain, but he doesn’t. “How--”

Sherlock looks up from the screen at last, and explains very slowly, clearly frustrated at the interruption, and this is the side of working-Sherlock that John _doesn’t_ like, too caught up in his own mental process to let John have any chance of helping. 

“Mason was a government scientist. The injuries to Abigail’s back were deliberately reminiscent of the claws of a werewolf. I already know the government is wrapped up with the werewolves somehow, and now one of their employees has gone rogue. I believe they killed her to get to him.”

John feels his mouth go dry. The werewolf business again. “Sherlock, are you telling me there’s a--a secret government plot to create...werewolves?”

“I’m not sure of the specifics,” Sherlock says, as though this is a great concession, “but broadly, yes.”

“Oh.” John just looks at him for a moment. Sherlock’s eyebrows twitch sardonically, a challenge. 

“You still think I’m out of my mind.”

“No,” says John, “no, it’s--fine.” It’s true, though. Sherlock has gone completely round the bend. John teeters over to sit down in his chair, needing something solid to counterbalance the sinking feeling in his belly. What should he do? Should he argue with Sherlock? Should he tell Mycroft? 

“John.”

He looks up to see Sherlock regarding him. His eyes are dark-rimmed, his hair wildly tousled from his habit of running his hands through it while he works. He looks like a fey creature, but his voice is steady, and his eyes are sharp. 

“I know how this sounds,” he says, “but I promise that it will all make sense eventually. Please, just bear with me a little longer.”

He sounds like himself, he sounds steady. He sounds the way he always does when he is secretly worried that he’s gone too far this time and John’s not going to help. And what can John say to that?

“Yeah. Okay.” He blows out his breath. “Okay. I don’t know what’s going on, but we’ll just--save all that until after the case, I suppose.”

Sherlock relaxes visibly. “Thank you,” he says. 

***

Eight days after their visit to Abigail’s flat, John is walking home from the market when he feels a tug at his sleeve. It’s a homeless person, a woman wrapped up in so many layers of tattered clothing that her face is the only part of her John can clearly see. She holds out a gloved hand. He’s about to murmur a refusal and walk away when he notices that she’s handing him something: a bit of paper. He takes it, and sure enough, it’s the photograph of Abigail and her brother, creased and dirty from being passed among many hands. On the back is written an address. 

“Thanks,” he says. He digs out his wallet to pay her, but when he looks up again, she’s gone, disappeared into the crowd. 

The photograph is enough to snap Sherlock out of his trance. He bangs his laptop shut and leaps to his feet.

“We’ll go immediately,” he says, as he stalks off toward his room to dress. “You should bring your gun. Wear something dark.”

***

The address on the photograph is in a poor area of town, derelict tenements crowded together along narrow streets; obviously not where their quarry would have his primary residence. Sherlock’s nerves hum with anticipation as he and John navigate the narrow streets. Mason: yes, he is an important piece in solving Abigail’s murder, but, more importantly, he is someone who knows something about werewolves. Someone who may have answers.

It’s dark by the time they arrive at the address, but Sherlock doubts it will make much difference; either they are being watched, or they aren’t. Sherlock was pleased to see that the address from the homeless network included a flat location: fifth floor, second from the right. That means that whoever followed Mason home also waited outside long enough to see which light turned on after he entered the building. It’s good work, if it proves true; if he finds out who it was, he’ll pay them a bonus. They pull their usual lost key trick, although this time the resident who lets them in doesn’t even seem interested in their explanation, just shrugs and lets them follow him through the door. As far as security goes, it leaves something to be desired, but it does have the advantage of being inconspicuous, a fine place for a highly-paid government scientist to pose as a harmless nobody. Mason’s window is dark from the outside, which suits Sherlock fine; if he isn’t home, they can learn as much as possible from his flat before he gets there, and surprise him when he comes in. This is far preferable to coming upon him at home, and perhaps having to force their way in. That would give him time to hide or destroy important information.

The building is old and smells strongly of cigarette smoke and greasy cooking, a powerful miasma that hangs thickly in the decrepit stairwells and starkly tiled halls. On the fifth floor, they are greeted by sounds of a man and woman shouting at each other in Serbo-Croatian while a small child screams its displeasure. It sets Sherlock’s teeth on edge, but he ignores the feeling, allowing himself a moment to feel thankful that the noise will mask the sound of his and John’s footsteps in the hall. He glances at John, who looks relaxed, returning Sherlock’s glance with a quirk of his eyebrow: _let’s get on with it_. 

It’s a simple matter to find the flat they’re looking for, second from the end of the hall. No light spills from beneath the sill of the old wooden door, but just to be safe, Sherlock knocks. He feels John tense beside him, and a long moment passes while they wait for an answer, but none comes. Out of sheerest illogical habit, Sherlock tries the doorknob--and turns it easily. The door is not latched or bolted, but swings outward a few inches when he pulls. 

This is bad. He exchanges a glance with John, and can see he’s thinking the same thing: Thomas Mason has already been found. There’s no help for it, though: they’ve already revealed themselves to whoever is in the room. John draws his gun. Sherlock takes a deep breath, feeling his body, mentally engaging with it. John looks at him; he nods. Sherlock opens the door.

It happens fast. Sherlock’s eyes take in four figures, one man tied to a chair, head in a sack, three men with guns. They don’t try to shoot him on sight, which means they either want him alive or don’t want to attract the attention of the neighbors. He darts left while John goes right; the man on the right does train his gun on John, but he moves too quickly. Sherlock doesn’t see exactly how John incapacitates his opponent, because he’s busy engaging with thug number two, twisting his arm and forcing him to drop his weapon with a fast, painful strike to the back of his wrist. By that time, John is already on the third man, the obvious ringleader, who has neither drawn his weapon nor engaged in any of the fighting so far. He allows John to twist his arm behind his back and press the SIG to his temple. Sherlock’s opponent is still trying to grapple with him, but John’s voice cuts through the noise.

“Call him off,” John says. The ringleader rolls his eyes, but nods fractionally at Sherlock’s opponent, who stills. In a move that perhaps violates the spirit of the cease-fire, Sherlock drops the man with a hard blow to the back of his head; this situation will be chaotic enough without an extra thug exercising his so-called brain. John’s man gives Sherlock a wry smile, not bothered in the least by the fate of his companion. 

“Sherlock Holmes,” he says. “We were hoping you’d show up.”

“Obviously,” says Sherlock, shaking out his hands. “Yes, I can see you’ve laid quite a nice little ambush.” He steps forward to pull the cloth sack off of the captive’s head to reveal, as expected, Thomas Mason, gagged and half-conscious.

“The perfect bait,” Sherlock says, slipping into lecturing mode as his thoughts click into place. “I’ll bet Thomas Mason was never really missing at all. You just wanted me to think he was so that I’d come looking.”

“Oh, he did run off,” says the thug, sounding like the indulgent owner of a runaway pet, “but we knew where he was all along, of course. Tracking device under the skin. They all have one.”

“Sherlock,” John says, “it’s time to call Lestrade.”

Sherlock ignores him, intent on Thomas Mason and the smiling man. There are answers here, answers he needs. 

“Who?” he asks. “Your pet scientists? That’s why he left, isn’t it? You had him doing something he didn’t approve of.”

“Yes.” The smiling man wants him to put it together. Very well, he’ll play along.

“The alpha-nine project.”

“Yes, go on.”

“You’re creating genetically-engineered werewolves.”

At this the man’s smile gives way to an exaggerated grimace. He tsks and rolls his eyes.

“Ugh, Mr. Holmes, I thought you were smarter than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“How did it feel when you were bitten?” Sherlock sees John tense--oh, no, he hadn’t really believed it, but now he will. This is corroboration. Oblivious, the man goes on. “Did it feel like a medical procedure? Is that the magic of science running in your veins, responding to the phases of the moon?”

This gives Sherlock pause, because, no, it _doesn’t_ feel like that. He keeps his face still, waiting.

“Do you really believe that secret government labs are capable of producing something that would change a person so completely, when modern medicine cannot even cure the common cold?”

“Come to the point,” Sherlock says.

“The _point_ , Mr. Holmes, is that we didn’t create them. How could we? They are real. They are old. All we have done is harness their powers.”

“What powers? What are you talking about?” 

“Their strength, their speed. Their ruthlessness. They can’t control themselves, but they can be used.”

“As what--some kind of super-soldiers? What’s the point of having a troop of madmen who can only fight one night in thirty?”

“Not soldiers, Mr. Holmes. Weapons.”

Sherlock begins to see: wild beasts who roam the night, who turn your neighbors, your children, your husbands and wives against you, who kill without mercy. Or, who turn you against your own people, leaving you to wake up in the morning with their blood still crusting your lips. An epidemic of horror. A whole village erased in a single night of bloodshed.

“That’s terrorism,” Sherlock says.

The man shrugs. “It is effective.”

“Sherlock,” John grits out. “Call Lestrade. Now.”

Sherlock had stopped seeing John, his razor-focus trained on the smiling man. But now he sees: John is livid. He hates this man. Every drawling, superior word grates on John’s nerves. His casual attitude toward death and violence is enough to make John want to strangle him and that, combined with the fact that he could break free at any second and force the issue of the gun, are enough to push John to the breaking point. He wants this over with. He wants this man _dealt with_ , wants to stop smelling the tobacco-sweet reek of him. _Oh_.

“I really think you ought to knock him out now, John.”

The man’s eyes widen. “Wait.” There’s more to his speech, then, but Sherlock decides he’s finished hearing it. He tenses, perhaps about to make a move, but Sherlock speaks quickly.

“I’m fairly certain he deserves it, anyway. He’s been smoking the same cigars as the man who killed Abigail Mason.”

John’s arm snaps back and down, and the fellow drops, pistol-whipped, down for the count. 

That just leaves Thomas Mason. Sherlock pulls the gag from his mouth while John works on trussing up the now-unsmiling man. 

“Not the police,” Masons slurs. There’s something not-quite-right about his reactions; drugged, maybe, or concussed.

“What?” says Sherlock. “Why?”

“They’ll never hold him. His boss will get him out.”

“Oh, I doubt it,” says Sherlock, quickly composing two texts on his phone. The first is to Lestrade. The second, to someone with a bit more authority. John has Mason untied by the time Sherlock hits send.

“Right,” says Sherlock. “They’re on their way, but we’re not going to be here when they arrive. Mr. Mason, can you walk?”

“Yes. What? Where are you taking me?” Sherlock hauls Mason upward out of the chair, ignoring his groggy protests, and heads for the door. John follows anxiously.

“Sherlock, what are we doing? Shouldn’t we stay here?”

“No,” says Sherlock. “If we stay here, the police will find out that Thomas Mason exists. They’ll want to hang onto him and ask him all sorts of questions.” He’s heading down the stairs now, Mason in tow, John taking the steps two at a time to keep up. 

“Yes,” John says, “and what’s wrong with that?”

“He needs to answer my questions first. Taxi!” To Sherlock’s relief, the first cab stops. He gets in with Mason, John follows, and they’re off, Mason squeezed uncomfortably between the two of them in the back of the cab. “221 Baker Street,” he tells the cabbie.

“What?” says John, in a harsh whisper, “we can’t take him _home_ , are you mad?”

“We can, and we are.” Sherlock leans forward to peer at John around their kidnapped scientist. John looks back at him, confused and angry. Sherlock wonders briefly whether he’s done the right thing, but yes, it’s definitely the only way he’s going to get what he needs. “John, listen to me. I know you’re having a hard time believing what’s been happening to me, but--”

_”Sherlock,”_ John cuts him off, “this man is in trouble, he’s the victim of an abduction and I don’t know what else. We can’t just take him home to our flat and feed him biscuits! Even if you _are_ turning into a...dammit, a _monster_ , once a month, that still doesn’t justify--”

That’s when Thomas Mason starts to laugh. It’s an eery, wheezing sound, punctuated by unsteady snorts. John’s eyes flick to Mason, then back to Sherlock.

“Oh, god,” Mason hiccups. “Oh, it was you,” he says. “Of course. It all makes sense.” He goes on laughing to himself, leaning forward to press his hands against his eyes. It’s not entirely a sane sort of laughter. Sherlock purses his lips in frustration. He is, as a general rule, not good at being patient with mad people, and dammit, this is _not_ what he needs right now. He needs this man lucid.

“What was me?” Sherlock asks. “What do you mean?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Mason asks. “Isn’t it perfectly clear to you?” He leans further down, clamping his head between his knees, locking his fingers across the back of his neck. 

“Thomas,” Sherlock says, as gently as he can, “what is it? What do you know?”

But Mason doesn’t answer, just sinks further into himself.

“Thomas,” Sherlock says, then, more sternly, “Thomas!” He tries to pry apart Thomas’ fingers, but John’s hand comes down heavily on his, stopping him. Sherlock looks up. Angry, he is _angry_ , needing this idiot to spill his guts, but John is calm, so very calm.

“Sherlock, he’s in shock. Just--let him be, will you?”

Sherlock stills himself, takes a deep breath. “Fine,” he says. “Yes, fine.” He takes his hand away, looks out the window. He doesn’t look at John--can’t, right now. His mind is whirling, trying to guess what Mason meant, what part he plays in all this. 

“Who did you text?” John asks. 

“What?”

“You sent two texts. One was to Lestrade, I hope.”

“Oh, yes. The other was to Mycroft.”

“ _Mycroft?_ What does he have to do with this?”

Shelock blows out is breath before replying. It ought to be frustrating, explaining things to John, who is so ordinary, who doesn’t _see_ , but somehow it isn’t. It feels comfortable, letting his thoughts unspool.

“Thomas Mason works--or worked--for the government, in some scientific capacity related to the alpha-nine project. The man you so perfunctorily rendered unconscious also works for the government. Mason knew him, and was worried that he would be able to get out of jail free with a little help from his superiors, but Mycroft, I’m sure, is superior to his superiors, not to mention having a certain amount of personal sway with the metropolitan police. I was simply ensuring that our man would stay put.”

“So, what you just--called in a favor?” John’s skepticism is understandable; though Mycroft now and then approaches Sherlock for help, Sherlock makes a point of never reciprocating. Nor has he done so now.

“Quite the opposite,” he says. “I’ve just done him a favor. Rather a large one, if my guess is right.”

“What’s your guess, then?”

“I think Mycroft is using my condition to further his own agenda. I think he knows about Alpha-Nine and doesn’t approve of it. He’s set me quite neatly on this trail, and is standing back whilst I do all the tedious legwork, so that he can present enough evidence to have the program shut down. It’s all very neat.” 

John licks his lips, obviously torn as to whether to believe this tale of sensational intrigue.

“So you’re just--playing into his hands, then? Serving up his evidence on a silver platter?”

“Yes and no,” Sherlock says. “I’ve sent him three murderous thugs wrapped up in a bow, since it served my interests at the time. But I’ve kept something back for myself as well.”

“Thomas Mason.”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” says John, pursing his lips. He leans back to drum his fingers on his thigh, and god, Sherlock loves him in that moment, so frustrated but still in the game.

“So it’s really true, then?” John asks. “There really is a government plot to create werewolves?”

“Not create them, John, you heard what he said.”

“Well, whatever. Christ, that’s weird, that’s really weird.”

“You sound relieved.”

“Yeah, I guess I am. Definitely.”

“John.” Sherlock feels his lips crooking into a smile, a genuine one, for the first time in weeks. “Are you saying you’d rather I be afflicted with lycanthropy than simply lose my mind?”

John looks back at him, the lights of london flicking past, and he begins to smile as well. “Obviously,” he says. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Definitely.” And just like that, Sherlock begins to laugh, the adrenaline of the past few hours sloughing away in sheets of mirth. After a moment, John joins in, covering his eyes with his hand as though he could shield himself against all this lunacy. They have barely sobered up by the time the cab reaches Baker Street, and it’s time to invite their quarry into their home.


	8. A Sinking Boat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enormous thanks to my delightful betas [Ruth0007](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruth0007/pseuds/Ruth0007) and Michele for helping make this chapter much better than it would otherwise have been! Any remaining infelicities are my own fault.
> 
> An announcement: I've decided to upgrade this fic's rating to mature, based on how Chapter 9 is going. (Chapter 8 will still conform to the "teen" rating.) I apologize to anyone who was counting on the low rating, and I guess this is your chance to try and convince me to do otherwise if you want, but...yeah, fyi.

Mason is not unconscious, but he is limp and uncooperative. Sherlock’s not sure what he’s on, but it’s more than shock; some kind of tranquilizer, probably. A cold, drizzling rain has begun to fall, seeping into both of their collars as they drag Mason bodily out of the cab and shoulder him in through the door of 221. Getting him up the stairs is an exercise in teamwork, and they are both out of breath by the time they reach the landing.

“Where to?” John huffs, as he kicks open the sitting-room door.

“My room,” says Sherlock, and they lumber like a crippled elephant through the kitchen and hallway to deposit Thomas on Sherlock’s bed with an undignified flop. He immediately curls onto his side, emitting an unsteady groan. Some corner of Sherlock’s mind notes with irritation the dirty shoes on his duvet, but it seems a minor concern under the circumstances.

“Well, there’s that,” John says, sounding just a touch sarcastic. “What’s next, then?” Sherlock doesn’t answer, because he hasn’t decided yet. 

“No plan?” John asks.

“My _plan_ was to speak to him,” Sherlock says, the intention dissolving even as he says it. 

“Well, you’ll just have to wait. Let him sleep it off. He’ll still be there in the morning.”

“Probably,” Sherlock amends.

“Jesus, I hope so,” John says. Sherlock feels a touch on his elbow, and looks down to see John there. “Meanwhile, I’m going to have some tea, try to relax a little. You coming?”

“Um,” says Sherlock, blinking. “Yes, all right.”

He follows John back out, closing the bedroom door firmly, then knocks around the sitting room while John makes tea. He stands at the window, notes that the rain is falling in earnest now, street-lights rippling in the puddles. The year is getting old; mid-October already. The months since summer have passed quickly.

“Come and sit down,” John says, curling up at one end of the sofa. Sherlock sits beside him, pulls his legs under himself, accepts a cup of tea. They sip in silence for a few minutes. Sherlock thinks of Mason, of the things he needs to know, but he’s no longer frustrated. He can be patient.

“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you,” John says. 

“Hmm?” says Sherlock. “No, it’s fine.”

John looks at him. The silence lengthens.

“Actually, none of it is very believable,” Sherlock says. “Just two weeks since the last time, and I can hardly believe it myself, even now.” 

“Well, I believe it,” John says. 

“Really?” says Sherlock. “What convinced you? I mean, it could still all be a lie, they could be manipulating me somehow.”

“But _something_ happened to you, twice,” John says. “And those idiots from today are involved. And they’re...well. They’re not good people. That’s enough for me. I don’t know if I believe that you’re turning into a giant shaggy dog, though? That part still seems crazy.” He smiles as he says it, though, pokes Sherlock’s thigh with his bare toe, and Sherlock can’t help smiling back.

“It is, isn’t it.”

“So, how are you--feeling? Right now?” John asks, and his toe is still there, just touching Sherlock’s leg, such a tentative messenger. Sherlock wants to--but should he? He will. He rests his hand on John’s foot, but that’s a little odd, so he slides his hand up, fingers curling around John’s ankle, feeling the bony complexity of it, the thick achilles tendon under his finger just twitching slightly in response. 

He considers the question. How does he feel? Maybe it’s some version of a post-case high, maybe it’s the dark of the moon, but he seems to be alone in his head, and that’s--

“Good,” he says. “Actually I feel quite...” he struggles to find a word for it, closing his eyes while John’s foot fidgets against him. “Light,” he tries. “Uncomplicated.”

“Ha,” John laughs. “That makes one of us.”

Sherlock looks at him, and his expression is so utterly _John_ , all the lines of his face stacked, teetering, against his natural reserve. Sherlock wants to make those lines fall apart, so he leans, his hand moving up to John’s knee, and there, that little crumple of uncertainty between John’s brows: he kisses it, and it melts, the whole thing melts. John’s face tips up, tilts, and Sherlock’s world narrows to a pinpoint as John’s lips touch his. _Oh_ , they are soft, edged in faint stubble, with a tongue behind them that just meets Sherlock’s own in a perfect caress that seems to turn his whole body to warm honey. _If we only ever have this one kiss_ , Sherlock thinks--then stops thinking as John shifts beneath him, moving so that they can lie parallel on the sofa. It feels a little crowded at first, all knees and elbows, but then one of John’s hands slips around the back of his neck, the other slides to the small of his back, and all at once they fit together. Sherlock is overwhelmed by the nearness of him, by the _smell_ of him. It’s the simple version for now, not augmented by the wolf’s senses, but it’s so strong, so close, and Sherlock finds that he just wants to bury himself in John, to burrow in and hide and be safe--

“Oh god, Sherlock--” That’s John’s voice, gasping as Sherlock presses the whole length of his body against him. Sherlock sucks John’s earlobe into his mouth, then moves downward, sucking and biting at the skin of John’s neck. John’s breath comes harder, laced with whispered curses, until Sherlock’s mouth is at the base of John’s neck, burrowing downward, seeking the blood-hot, skin-scented air that wafts up out of his shirt collar. The skin that covers John’s ribcage feels hot against Sherlock’s hands, up inside his clothes, and god, he wants to _get him out of this_ , all these layers that hide his scent away, and just _taste _him, taste his skin. How would John feel about being licked all over? Sherlock’s never felt this before, this particular desire, but it’s--__

_Bang._

__Sherlock freezes, feels John do the same beneath him. The noise comes again, a sharp thud from the direction of his bedroom. _Mason_. Sherlock suppresses a groan; for the first time in days, the activities of Thomas Mason are not the most interesting topic at hand. John looks up at him, pupils dilated, mouth red, and Sherlock lets himself think for a moment that Mason has simply fallen out of bed, so he can just stay here, with John, and--_ _

_Crash!_

__And that’s enough to get Sherlock on his feet, with John right behind him. The only thing in his room big enough to make that much noise is his bureau, and when he gets to the bedroom door he finds that, sure enough, it’s been tipped over, Sherlock’s belongings scattered, and standing in the middle of the pile is Thomas Mason, mouth stretched wide in a lunatic grin._ _

__“Got your attention,” he says. He sways a little on his feet, as though not quite recovered from whatever drug he’d been given. His hands are moving ceaselessly, and Sherlock sees that he is touching the tip of each finger sequentially to the thumb of the same hand, first one hand, then the other. Sherlock has seen similar ritualistic gestures in people afflicted with psychosis; he begins to revise his estimate of how much information he’ll be able to get out of his captive._ _

__“Sherlock Holmes.” Mason looks entirely satisfied with himself. “How are you holding up? I’m doing fine, thanks for asking.”_ _

__It takes moment for Sherlock to put the clues together, but when he does he wants to kick himself for being so oblivious: the connection to Flannagan, the disappearance from public life, the tracking device._ _

__“You’re a werewolf.”_ _

__“Of course I am,” Mason replies. “Bet you didn’t expect _that_.” He’s still grinning belligerently, but he’s clearly groggy, hiccuping through his words. His fingers tap: 1-2-3-4, 5-6-7-8._ _

__“Thomas,” says John, approaching him slowly. “Are you all right?”_ _

__What is John doing? Oh--a light touch, reaching out to him. Sherlock would never have thought of it. John knows how to look small when he wants to, non-threatening._ _

__“Hey, Thomas,” he says, very gently, almost crooning, “what’s the matter? Hm?”_ _

__The effect on Thomas is extraordinary, his eyes fixing on John with a kind of watery hopefulness._ _

__“What’s the matter?” John says again, and Thomas actually blubbers a bit before speaking._ _

__“I didn’t want to,” he says._ _

__“Didn’t want to what?” John asks, so gently, and Sherlock marvels at it, at this gentleness of John’s, that he can bring out and make use of whenever he needs to._ _

__“I didn’t want to bite him,” Thomas says. A knot of cold knowledge takes root in Sherlock’s belly. But John doesn’t know it yet._ _

__“Bite who?” he asks. “Can you tell me what you mean?”_ _

__Thomas pounds his hands against his knees, frustrated. “ _Him_ ,” he says. “Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t want to, but they made me do it. They put me in his way.”_ _

__John’s eyes dart to Sherlock, and Sherlock sees the steel beneath the gentleness. John knows, John understands._ _

__“Who made you do it, Thomas?”_ _

__“Flannagan,” he whispers. “She told me, before the moon rose. Told me what was going to happen. I didn’t listen to her, I _wouldn’t_ , but then...” he trails off._ _

__“Then you caught sight of me,” Sherlock says, stepping into Thomas’ field of vision, “and instinct took over.”_ _

__“Yes,” Thomas says, wonderingly. “Instinct. Is it like that for you, too? How you can’t--you want to do horrible things, and you can’t stop yourself? Is that how you feel, too?”_ _

__He sounds so hungry for the answer that Sherlock wonders whether he’s ever spoken to one of his own kind before. _Am I normal?_ Sherlock is sharply reminded of his teenage self, going through things, having no one to ask, no one to share with..._ _

__“Yes,” Sherlock says. “I’ll talk to you if you’ll talk to me. Will you?”_ _

__Thomas looks from him to John and back, then nods, his eyes wide._ _

__“Can you come and sit down for me?” John says, sounding every inch a doctor. “Just sit on the bed, here? Good, that’s good.”_ _

__Thomas perches on the edge of the mattress, and John sits down next to him, a few feet away. Sherlock debates getting down low, like John, but he finds that he can’t quite make himself do it. He settles for standing a bit off to the side, hoping that will appear less confrontational. Thomas looks docile, for the moment, but two minutes ago he was turning over furniture. It’s possible that a wrong word from Sherlock will send him raving again--but then, he’s bound to return to that state soon enough in any case. Best to be direct, and get it over._ _

__“You’re a werewolf,” he begins, not a question. “How long have you been one?”_ _

__“Oh, a long time,” Thomas says, blinking fast, as though he finds the question difficult. “About since I was nineteen. Backpacking in the Urals, got bitten.”_ _

__His answer is startling. Nineteen! He must be nearly 30 by now. Sherlock hadn’t meant to delve much into his past, but he is curious. “And you’ve lived with your condition all that time?”_ _

__Thomas nods. “I’d left home by then, I found places to hide. And I...I started looking for a cure. I worked in a biochem lab, you know, lots of useful stuff to hand. I had ideas.”_ _

__“Had?” says Sherlock. “Why did you stop working on it?”_ _

__“That’s when she found me.” Thomas’ eyes grow distant for a moment, and then he startles and looks back over his shoulder, as though hearing something. John touches his arm._ _

__“When who found you, Thomas?”_ _

__He jumps again, less violently, and his eyes focus on John once more. “Oh. Doctor Flannagan. She caught me nicking hemoglobin samples. Threatened to ruin me if I didn’t cooperate.”_ _

__Sherlock can see that Thomas’ pulse has quickened, a light sheen of sweat standing on his brow. He glances at John, knows that John’s noticed it, too. Whatever is coming, Thomas is nervous of it, doesn’t want to talk._ _

__“And what did she want you to do?”_ _

__“Oh.” Thomas looks over his shoulder again, swallowing convulsively. “She wanted to study me. My problem. And I thought--well, all right, maybe she can help me. But. She didn’t want to help me. She wanted to use me. She made me do things. She made me hurt people. I bit people, and they...they...” His words are cut off by uncontrollable shaking, hands clasping his upper arms as he seems to collapse in on himself. Sherlock waits, but his patience is thin at the best of times._ _

__“How many did you bite?”_ _

__Thomas twitches, and there’s a pause during which his expression hardens, though he maintains his self-protective posture. “It gets worse every time,” he says, snapping out the words. “Each one becomes part of you. You lose a little more, every time.” He looks both angry and afraid, now, his eyes bright and feral._ _

__“A little more of what?” Sherlock asks. His voice sounds urgent in his ears, and John shoots him a warning look, but he needs answers. “Try to be clear with me, Thomas. Please.”_ _

__“So you haven’t turned anyone yet.”_ _

__“No.”_ _

__“Then you don’t know,” Thomas says, bitterly. “You can’t guess how it is. You lose a bit of yourself every time. And you get a little of someone else. I’ve got a bit of you, Sherlock Holmes. And you’ve got a bit of me inside you, now. That’s how it works.” His mouth spreads into a wide and toothy grin, and for the first time since bringing him here, Sherlock feels afraid._ _

__“When you bite someone, you take on part of their personality,” Sherlock says. “That’s why you’re mad.”_ _

__“What right have you to call me mad, when we are brothers?” Mason rumbles, his eyebrows lowering. “When the wolf is in you, too. How are you feeling, Sherlock?” His mouth twists in mock concern, and Sherlock shivers at the reminder of John’s words of only a few minutes ago. “Are you feeling good? Sane? I used to feel like that sometimes, at the dark of the moon. But it would never last long.” Sherlock doesn’t answer, and Mason’s eyes slide back toward John, though he keeps talking to Sherlock._ _

__“I can smell you on him, you know,” he says. John’s eyes flick to Sherlock, his mouth compressed into a thin line. What does that look mean? Sherlock isn’t sure. Mason goes on speaking. “Oh, yes, I can smell it. Different from when you first brought me here. You wanted to mark your territory. I don’t think that’s very wise, do you?”_ _

__“What do you mean?”_ _

__“The wolf wants him, doesn’t it?” His voice is low, conspiratorial, viciously sympathetic. “It’s obvious, Sherlock. You feel clean right now, but deep inside you want to tear him to shreds. You want to consume him, make him one with you. And he’d let you do it, too. I can smell his love for you.”_ _

__“You’re lying.”_ _

__“Would you take that chance?”_ _

__“That’s enough,” John interrupts, firmly. “I can take care of myself.”_ _

__“Can you?” Mason says. He turns to eye John speculatively for a moment, which is all the warning they get before he launches himself at John. Sherlock’s heart leaps into his throat, but John reacts quickly, writhing away from Thomas’ grip. Thomas grabs John around the waist and pulls him to the floor. Sherlock grabs Thomas from behind, trying to drag him off of John, but it’s like holding a wild animal, and Thomas twists to claw at his face. Sherlock fends him off, trying to take hold of Thomas’ wrists, but Thomas evades his grip and gets his hands around Sherlock’s throat. For a long, awful moment Sherlock can only stare up into his eyes, wide and feral, all trace of humanity gone, while Thomas’ thumbs press at his windpipe--_ _

__\--and then John’s weight comes down on both of them, straddling Thomas from behind. John does something to Thomas’ shoulder that makes him cry out and loosen his grip, and then John is pulling Thomas’ hands behind him. Thomas writhes and snarls, but John is efficient. Sherlock can’t see what’s happening until Thomas’ weight rolls to the side so that he can struggle free. John is putting the finishing touches on his work, tying Thomas’ bound wrists to his ankles with a pair of Sherlock’s dress socks. Sherlock struggles to his feet, catches his breath._ _

__“Well,” says John, straightening up, “That went well. What next?”_ _

__“Mycroft,” Sherlock rasps._ _

__“Will Mycroft get him out of our house?”_ _

__“Almost certainly.”_ _

__“Then I’m all for it.”_ _

__***_ _

__John looks after Mason while Sherlock makes the call. Mason is raving, struggling against his bonds and snarling wordlessly. John doesn’t think he can get free, but he keeps an eye on him anyway. He sits down on the edge of the bed, presses his hands together, and considers the creature before him. He can hear Sherlock’s voice on the telephone in the other room: clipped syllables, explaining._ _

___The wolf wants him_ , Thomas said. _You want to tear him to shreds._ _ _

__John couldn’t miss the effect those words had on Sherlock: they frightened him. Sherlock had reacted as though those things were true. They might be, John supposes; Sherlock had told him that the wolf took over his mind, that he wasn’t himself when he...transformed._ _

___Well, bollocks to that,_ John thinks. The idea that Sherlock would hurt him is preposterous. And if he did, if he tried to, John would handle it. He’s not afraid of Sherlock. _ _

__When Mycroft arrives, he is accompanied by four formidable looking men in dark suits. John gives up custody of Thomas to them, then goes to join the discussion in the sitting room. Sherlock is sitting in John’s chair, with Mycroft opposite; rather than sit down, John goes to stand beside Sherlock, leaning his hip against the padded side of the chair. Mycroft’s eyes flick to him, and John does not miss the slight twitch of his eyebrow as Mycroft’s gaze takes in the pair of them, as though he’s just put something together. John isn’t sure how to feel about that, but there isn’t time to dwell on it. Sherlock is speaking._ _

__“I need to know everything,” he says. “From the beginning.”_ _

__Mycroft sighs and plants his feet._ _

__“The beginning is a bit too far back, even for me,” he says, “but I suppose you’ll want to know that the Alpha-Nine project is a part of the Ultra-Secret Technology division of British military intelligence. You can think of it as a sort of MI-7, if you like.”_ _

__“You’re serious?” John says. He’s heard rumors, of course--guys in the service who’d swear up and down that the government was working on all sorts of mad things: mind-conrol devices, alien death-rays, weapons powered by occult rituals and blood sacrifice. He’s always dismissed them as fantasy._ _

__“Quite serious,” Mycroft replies. “Though the reality is a good deal less glamorous than you might imagine. In any case, all of that is technically beyond my level of clearance.” His hand goes to the knot of his tie, absently tugging. It’s an oddly human gesture, in the context of what he’s just admitted. “I only learned about it unofficially a few years ago. Since then, I’ve had--friends--keeping me informed of the division’s activities. Dr. Flannagan’s work came to my attention about the time she acquired Thomas Mason.”_ _

__“Flannagan,” says Sherlock. “She’s in charge?”_ _

__“Yes. I knew her before she got Alpha-Nine. I must say I have always thought her rather too...hungry.”_ _

__“You must have got along quite well,” Sherlock says._ _

__“If you suppose that our personalities conflicted, you are not wrong. However, my objection to her work goes far beyond a mere interpersonal power struggle. I find her scheme for weaponized lycanthropy to be not only morally dubious, but also riddled with illogic and infeasibility.”_ _

__“Infeasibility?” John repeats, before he can stop himself. “Morally _dubious_? Is that what you call it?”_ _

__“You don’t have to convince me.” Mycroft holds up a hand. “The problem is that her division is protected from the ordinary level of meddling which I am able to achieve. Shutting down Alpha-Nine would require that it be exposed, at least to other factions of the government if not the general public. There would need to be a scandal, an outcry. Thus far, I have not been able to engineer one.”_ _

__“Thus far,” Sherock muses. “And where do I come in, pray tell? What manner of pawn am I?”_ _

__“As you suggest, she intended--and still does intend, as far as I know--to use you to get to me,” Mycroft says. “She knows I am working against her and would like to hold your safety as a bargaining chip. Thus far, I have prevented her from taking you physically captive, though of course the fact that she successfully infected you is a victory of sorts on her part.”_ _

__“And a failure, _of sorts_ , on yours,” Sherlock says. Mycroft only looks at him levelly, so Sherlock goes on. “Well, I know how you love to turn failures into opportunities, so I suppose you must have a plan. Would you be so kind as to tell me what it is, or must I have it sprung upon me at the worst possible moment, like all the other mere mortals?”_ _

__“I’m afraid that depends on you,” Mycroft says. “Flannagan still wants you, obviously.”_ _

__Sherlock narrows his eyes, contemplates his brother silently for a long moment. Mycroft lowers his chin, returning Sherlock’s look. John holds his breath._ _

__“You want me to hand myself over,” Sherlock says at last. “You think I can--how did you put it? _Engineer_ your scandal.”_ _

__“That might be effective,” Mycroft admits--pretends to admit-- “If you’re willing.”_ _

__“Hang on,” says John, before Sherlock can answer. “Sorry, no, that’s not happening.”_ _

__“John--” Sherlock says, but John is unwilling to be placated._ _

__“Sherlock, you’ve seen the state Mason’s in. Do you want to end up like that? She’s had people killed, for god’s sake. You can’t just--”_ _

__“John, please. She may be unscrupulous, but she isn’t stupid. If she wants to use me against Mycroft, she’ll have to keep me in one piece.”_ _

__“Only more or less, Sherlock,” John argues. He knows enough about hostage situations to have some idea of how badly wrong this could go. “Only in the long term. She can do whatever she likes to you, short of killing you.”_ _

__“She wouldn’t have time,” Mycroft says. “You would go in, get details, and get out. If necessary, we would extricate you.”_ _

__“Naturally. When?”_ _

__“You’ll have more time to work if you wait until after the upcoming full moon,” Mycroft says._ _

__“That would also give me a reason to go calling,” Sherlock says. “Let her think there was something difficult about the change this time, a reason for me to seek her expertise.”_ _

__“Hang on,” John says. “Just...stop.”_ _

__They both turn to look at him blandly. They are going to do it, John realizes. With or without his consent. There’s no physical way he can stop it._ _

__“You can have _one_ day, Sherlock. And then I am coming in for you myself.”_ _

__Sherlock offers John a tight smile, then turns to Mycroft, who rolls his eyes. “I suppose it will have to do.”_ _

__At this point, the four agents emerge from Sherlock’s room, two of them supporting Mason, who is now far under, probably drugged again. A small part of John wonders whether that’s really ethical, given that he was sedated with an unknown drug only hours ago, but mainly he feels rather spitefully glad to see Mason go, whatever his state. On the way out, one of the men hands something to Mycroft: a plastic bag containing a small, dark object. The inside of the bag is smeared with blood. Mycroft hands the bag to Sherlock._ _

__“The so-called tracking device,” he says. “You can do what you like with it. It’s just an active RFID capsule, readable at about five hundred feet.”_ _

__Sherlock takes the baggie, examines it. “That would still be enough to track his movements through populated areas, if you had the right network.”_ _

__“As Flannagan, naturally, does. I’ll leave it with you, shall I? There’s no sense in revealing Mason’s location to her.” Mycroft stands up, straightens the crease in his trousers. “I must be on my way, for now. I’ll be in touch soon.”_ _

__“I’ll show you out,” John says. Mycroft gives him an odd look._ _

__“Surely that’s not necessary.”_ _

__“I know,” John says, but he still follows Mycroft down the stairs. In the foyer, Mycroft turns to him expectantly._ _

__“Two things,” says John. “One, Abigail Mason.” He pauses fractionally, uncertain how best to phrase his question. “Was she involved in all this?”_ _

__“If you’re asking whether she was thrown into your path deliberately to provoke Sherlock’s involvement, the answer appears to be no, as far as my people have been able to ascertain. What she felt for you appears to have been genuine.”_ _

__John nodes, at once sorry and enormously relieved. “And did she know? About her brother?”_ _

__“That, I fear, is destined to remain a mystery, unless we can learn the answer from Mason himself. Now, your second question?”_ _

__John draws in a deep breath. “I need you to tell me, to my face, that you had nothing to do with this.”_ _

__Mycroft frowns. “Nothing to do with what?”_ _

__John keeps his voice low with an effort. “You know bloody well what.”_ _

__Mycroft’s eyebrows rise. “Doctor Watson, are you suggesting that I would have had my brother_ bitten_ in order to further my own political ends?”

“I think you would. Yeah.”

Mycroft frowns deeply at first, then looks away. “Well, perhaps,” he says, quietly. “But in this case, I didn’t. Now, John, I believe you owe me an answer in return.”

“Fair enough.”

“Just what is my brother to you, nowadays? Things seem...different, between you.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s still none of your business,” John says, but the words sound a little too ready, even to his own ears.

“I see,” Mycroft says; he looks...speculative? Satisfied? John doesn’t have time to process the expression before Mycroft turns and heads for his car, excusing himself with a rather curt nod.

John ascends the stairs again, trying to guess what’s passed between Sherlock and Mycroft that he wasn’t privy to. Just when he thinks he knows Sherlock inside and out, Mycroft shows up and demonstrates that Sherlock has a side he’ll never fully appreciate, never be able to relate to in the way that Mycroft can, as the only person in Sherlock’s life who can match his intelligence. This isn’t even the first time that it’s happened; he lets out a gusty sigh as he lets himself back into the flat, only to find Sherlock standing just a few feet from the door, waiting for him.

“What is it?” Sherlock asks. “What did Mycroft say to you?”

“It’s nothing,” John says. Sherlock is looking at him with an intense, bemused expression, and John finds himself suddenly uncomfortable. He ducks his gaze and tries to get past, but Sherlock takes his arm, stopping him. They just stand that way for a moment, Sherlock’s fingers hot through John’s sleeve, and then Sherlock is pressing John backward, propelling him step by step until his back is pressed against the cool wood of the sitting room door. Sherlock looks down at him, terribly close, and John is painfully aware of the long, warm length of Sherlock’s body, of how their angles will fit together if Sherlock presses against him. He sees Sherlock’s tongue flick across his lower lip.

Sherlock hesitates a moment as though gauging John’s reaction, and then...then kisses him, stoops to crush his lips ferociously to John’s. It’s different from before, but it’s... _oh_. John swallows a whimper as Sherlock closes the last inches between them, and he finds that he’s helpless to prevent they way his body responds, arching up against the contact, feeling the bones of Sherlock’s hips, feeling one long, lean thigh pressing between his legs. Sherlock kisses him hungrily, sucking, nipping at John’s lips and tongue, and John welcomes it, tangles his fingers in Sherlock’s hair to pull him close, intensifying the contact.

Sherlock kisses John until he is breathless, lost in the tidal heat of it. John is dimly aware of time passing, but all he really feels is the rhythm of Sherlock pressing against him, the dark and steamy space created between their bodies. After a while they’re not even kissing, not really, just pressing together, breathing each other’s air, mouths and hands restlessly seeking purchase, trying to pass the barriers of clothing and skin. John is on the verge of scraping together enough sense to suggest that they head for a bedroom when Sherlock’s teeth close hard on the skin of his neck, bruising. John gasps, arching into it--

\--when suddenly Sherlock’s head snaps up, his eyes wide and fearful. He pushes himself violently backward, leaving John cold and unmoored.

“Sherlock?” It takes a moment for John to get breath back into his lungs. “What are you--”

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock pants. He touches his hand to his mouth, looks at it. His expression is agonized, and John wants to go to him, kiss his reddened lips, but Sherlock is backing away, trembling.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. “Please don’t.” 

And then he’s stumbling away, away towards his bedroom, where the Wolf has been making a mess of everything.


	9. Too Young to Know

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may notice the chapter count has gone up again. I hope you will forgive me, since at least this chapter was pretty fast in coming. 
> 
> Made some slight updates to the tags.
> 
> This chapter was beta'd by my darling [Ruth0007](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruth0007/pseuds/Ruth0007), as well as the lovely and talented [MojoFlower](http://archiveofourown.org/users/MojoFlower/pseuds/MojoFlower). (You really ought to go and help yourself to some of Mojo's fic, especially the delicious [Shatter the Darkness](http://archiveofourown.org/works/651740/chapters/1186409), in which Sherlock is a genie, which is even more fantastic than it sounds.) Again, their feedback greatly improved this chapter, and again, I did foolishly ignore them on a couple of points, so please direct all complaints to me. :-)

Sherlock’s bedroom door doesn’t have a lock, or he would lock it. Heart still pounding, he leans his back against the door and surveys the jumble of his belongings: shirts and underthings spilled from the drawers of the tipped dresser, the disarray showing clear signs of struggle. The bed is more rumpled than he left it: they must have lain Mason down on his face to take out the implant. Dirty boot-scuffs, a smell of blood.

He picks his way across the jumbled floor, undresses, crawls between cool sheets, beneath the soiled comforter. He breathes in the jarring mixture of smells: his own, other people’s. Something sharp and antiseptic, something earthy and crude. All sense of comfort is gone. His bedroom has become a wolf’s den, he thinks. Appropriate. 

_John_. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Kissing John is supposed to be...sweet. He wants--he remembers wanting--to take John in his arms, to encircle him, to protect him and be protected...to be _perfected_ by the act of holding John. It’s been hardly more than an hour since he pressed his lips to the soft furrows of John’s brow and counted himself happy.

But now...this. This sharp, hungry desire, mindless and overwhelming. He wants to cover up his John, wants to consume him and erase him and _absorb_ him, wants to rasp away John’s substance and take it into himself, like licking a wound raw. And that isn’t what he meant, it isn’t _right_. It’s not how things are supposed to be.

He can smell Thomas Mason’s presence in his room, in his bedclothes. Mason claimed that they were brothers, and it’s true that he derives a crude sort of solace from the scent of him, as though some part of the Wolf’s psyche desires the company of pack-mates. The sense of kinship feels wrong, nauseating, but it’s too difficult to sort out right now, so he just breathes, letting the feelings come, letting his thoughts blur into a white haze.

John knocks on his bedroom door, shocking the world back into focus.

“Go away,” Sherlock growls. But John--stupid, insistent John--pushes the door open anyway, steps into the room, sees Sherlock lying there. Sherlock doesn’t want to be seen, presses his face into the pillow.

“Sherlock.” He can hear things shifting as John wades through the clutter, then feels the dip of the bed as John sits down. John doesn’t touch him. Sherlock shivers.

John clears his throat. “I wish you’d tell me what you need,” he says.

Sherlock clamps his body against the mattress, resisting the roil of conflicting urges brought on by the nearness of John. Calm. He must be perfectly clear. 

“I need you to leave me alone.” 

Sherlock grits his teeth, waiting for John to respond: to argue, to plead, to get angry, to acquiesce. But John does none of those things. He sits for a few moments, infuriatingly near, and then Sherlock feels his weight leave the mattress. He opens his eyes when he hears the sound of something large moving: John is righting the tipped dresser. He shoves it back against the wall, then stoops to pick up a handful of socks from the floor. 

“John, don’t,” says Sherlock, but John ignores him, just goes on tidying up while Sherlock watches, bewildered, from his bed. John scoops things up, puts anything that’s still neatly folded back into the drawers, chucks the rest into a hamper in the closet. Besides clothes, there are a few other objects scattered around: books, a lamp. John replaces these. He gives the room an appraising look, frowns, then leaves. Sherlock can hear his footsteps creaking up the stairs, and he has the oddest image of dust falling down from the bottom of the stairs, the impact of John’s footsteps raining down on everything below. 

Steps on the floor above, a rustling, another trip down the stairs, and then John is back, carrying a large bundle of beige-and-black plaid print. He drops it on the floor, then advances on Sherlock’s position. John reaches toward him, but Sherlock is too confused to react, until suddenly John is stripping away his duvet, leaving Sherlock cold and exposed beneath only his sheet. Sherlock yelps, contracts his body protectively inward, but John leaves the sheet in place. He goes back to the foot of the bed, picks up the bundle, shakes it out, and it’s--

Oh. It is John’s duvet, from his own bed. John takes it by the corners and tosses it over him, downy billows settling as John straightens out the edges. It alights softly at first, then comes to rest more firmly, warm and cocooning. It smells of John, and nothing else whatsoever. Sherlock lies perfectly still, feeling relieved, feeling unworthy. It is so...good. Perfect.

John gathers up Sherlock’s duvet and takes it away. 

***

John gives Sherlock his space. It seems to be all he can do. After their delightful, confusing, disastrous snog session against the sitting room door, Sherlock spends the rest of the night in his room. John sleeps on the sofa (under a clean sheet and a spare blanket from his own room), but he has a shift scheduled early in the morning that he can’t blow off.

Still, before he goes to the clinic, John checks on Sherlock, just presses the door gently open. He moves as quietly as he can, but Sherlock’s eyes fly open immediately. John goes to him. He reaches a hand to touch Sherlock’s hair, and Sherlock starts and pulls away like a surprised cat. John reacts, catches him, wraps a hand firmly around the back of Sherlock’s neck. Sherlock is tense, but John holds him, stroking his thumb along the bone behind his ear, until Sherlock relaxes all at once, eyelids lowering as his body goes slack. 

“Hey,” John says, quietly. Sherlock’s gaze flickers back to his face. “Will you be all right for a while? If I go to work?”

“Of course I’ll be _all right_ ,” Sherlock grumbles, with something like his old acidity. “I’m fine.”

John tries for a smile, but it feels like a grimace. “I’ll go, then,” he says. “You can text if you need anything, yeah?”

Sherlock looks ready to protest, then rolls his eyes and settles for “Fine.” 

John lets go, sets his hand briefly on the plaid-covered hillock of Sherlock’s shoulder, and leaves to go to work.

Sherlock is up and about when John gets home that evening. He’s even dressed, if you can apply that term to his standard dressing gown-and-pajamas ensemble, and he’s busily clicking away on his computer. 

“Mycroft’s sent us something,” he says. “Building plans. Come and look.”

John goes to look at Sherlock’s screen. The front of his shoulder brushes against Sherlock’s back; Sherlock doesn’t quite flinch, but he does pull away, not subtly enough to avoid John’s notice. John ignores it, focusing on the large PDF that Sherlock is scrolling through. It is, indeed, a schematic of some large facility, with floor plans, electrical, and plumbing laid out in different colors.

“What’s this?” John asks.

“It’s where the Alpha-Nine project is based. Other projects as well, I’m sure.”

“So, what, we can just go there any time?”

“Not quite. The problem is, no one’s quite sure where it’s located. Mycroft’s narrowed it down to a few potential sites based on satellite imagery.”

“But we can plan, at least,” John says. “How we’ll get you out.”

“And where I’ll need to get to whilst I’m there. Yes.”

And so, they plan. Over the course of that evening, Sherlock enlarges and prints out the schematics, taping together numerous pieces of paper and tacking them to the wall. They examine them, try to guess what parts of the building serve what purpose, look for routes in and out, scrutinize the electrical grid. They annotate and record. When John starts nodding over his notes, Sherlock makes him go and lie down on the sofa, where he remains peripherally aware of Sherlock’s movements even in his sleep.

For the next several days, John and Sherlock work together, poring over documents that Mycroft sends. John goes to work as usual, and looks forward to his brainwork sessions with Sherlock in the evenings. Sherlock seems...recovered. Normal. Focused. But he won’t touch John, or let John touch him in any way. There are moments when John is able to forget that Sherlock’s lips have been on his lips, that Sherlock’s hands have been on his skin, but every so often he will catch Sherlock’s gaze, and he will remember, and he will wish, fervently, for all of this to be over, for Sherlock to--

What? John thinks one afternoon, no longer seeing the paper he’s supposed to be reading. What is he waiting for? For Sherlock to be finished with being a werewolf? That outcome hasn’t even been discussed--John’s not even sure it’s possible. Before--before he really understood, really _believed_ it--he was waiting for Sherlock to just snap out of it, for this momentary delusion to pass, for something to prove to Sherlock that he was wrong, that he was all right. Now, though, John knows that it’s not just a delusion. It’s a real, physical problem, a malady. 

“John?” Sherlock asks, looking up at him across the jumble of printouts spread over the kitchen table. “Are you all right?”

John considers before answering. He sets his pen down.

“Thomas said he was looking for a cure.”

Sherlock blinks, as though he honestly needs a moment to remember what John is talking about. 

“Do you think he found one? I mean, is there one? Do you think?”

“No idea.”

They don’t talk about it any further, but John thinks about it. It’s possible that Thomas could be induced to keep looking for a cure, but John doesn’t hold out much hope for that; the man is broken. Meanwhile, they’ll have to consider it incurable. It doesn’t seem to be a deadly illness, in itself, but it is... _chronic_ , John’s medical brain supplies. If it can’t be cured, it will have to be managed. It will have to be got around, and that won’t happen if they don’t acknowledge it, if they just sit here _not talking_ about whatever tangle of wrong ideas is making Sherlock think he has to keep John at arm’s length. What John would like to do is take Sherlock by the collar and _make_ him understand that John can take anything he can dish out. 

“Sherlock,” he says instead, and Sherlock looks up at him again, eyes sharp. It takes a moment for John to collect the rest of his words together, looking for something to say that’s not too aggressive, but not pleading, either. He settles on, “Tell me why you won’t touch me.” It does sound like pleading, a little. 

Sherlock inhales slowly through his nose before answering. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“If you’re afraid you’re going to hurt me--”

“John,” Sherlock interrupts. “I _will_ hurt you. You’re hoping for some kind of...of fairy tale reassurance. You don’t think it could really happen. But it _can_ happen and it _will_ happen.”

John holds Sherlock’s gaze, unflinching. He is not afraid of Sherlock, but being unafraid is not the same as being unaware of danger.

“Do you think I won’t hurt you back?” he says.

Sherlock’s eyes narrow, flicking over John as though seeing him for the first time, and it seems he has nothing to say in response.

“Hm,” he says at last, then goes back to working. It’s a kind of progress, John thinks.

***

Sherlock is able to keep relatively focused on his task until a bit more than twenty-four hours before his transformation. That afternoon, though, he finds that his brain is no longer really working. Frustrated, he paces; he’s not even aware of what he’s doing until a hand on his arm stops him, and he looks down into John’s worried eyes. 

“Let’s take a break, yeah?” John says. “Sit down. I’ll make tea.”

Sherlock sits down in John’s chair--which is rapidly becoming his chair, given how frequently he occupies it--and draws his knees up to his chest. John hands him the promised mug of tea, then sits down opposite, watching him. Sherlock bears this scrutiny for a few minutes, and then, because his nervous energy demands some outlet, he starts talking.

“I can’t concentrate,” he says. John’s eyebrows rise a little, his listening face. Sherlock finds that he wants to go on. “I’ve hardly slept in three days, my head hurts, I can’t eat, I can’t focus on anything for more than three bloody minutes, and I would kill for a fucking cigarette.”

“Hm,” John says. “Stress.”

It takes a moment for Sherlock to parse this. 

“What?” he finally says.

“You’re under a lot of stress,” John says. “Insomnia, headache, inability to concentrate, upset stomach. Irritability as well, by the way. Textbook case.”

“John,” Sherlock huffs. How dare he? “You know very well it isn’t _stress_ , it’s--”

“Bollocks,” says John. Sherlock shuts his mouth; he’s aware that he’s making a sour face, but he doesn’t much care. “I know perfectly well that stress isn’t your only problem, but the way you’re feeling right now? You’re wound so tight, I could pluck you like a fiddle-string. Speaking of that, in fact, why don’t you play your violin for a while, or go for a walk? Take a long shower. I dunno, do some tai chi or something.”

“Tai chi?” Sherlock grimaces. “Are you serious?”

“Mm,” says John, drinking tea.

Sherlock scowls. He hugs his legs more tightly to his chest. Tai chi. The very idea. Still...still, there may be something in it. He scowls more deeply.

“Fine,” he says. “I’ll take a walk.”

“Good,” says John.

“It’s cold outside.”

“I know.”

“Fine.” He sits, scowling, for a minute more, then goes and puts proper clothes on for the first time in six days. 

He goes for a walk. He sees things: birds, leaves, adulterers, clouds, small-time drug dealers, starving artists, sibling rivals. Also a bookshop. The autumn air bites his face. When he gets home a bit after dark, he finds that he does feel a good deal better, though he’ll be damned if he’ll give John the satisfaction of admitting it. Feeling tired, he announces that he’s going to bed. John says “good night” without looking up from his book. 

He dreams about sex. In the dream, John is on top of him, holding his hands down against the earth, which is a very particular mixture of humus and greenish sand that he remembers from his grandmother’s summer house in Dover. John kneels astride him, feet clamped over Sherlock’s knees, immobilizing him. There’s green grass growing up around John’s knees, and around Sherlock’s wrists where John is pinning him. His dream-self is paying more attention to the grass than to the sex, which is frustrating, but there’s something good even about that, a sense of oneness that blends with the other feelings. The grass grows longer, lusher, spreading out all around them now to make a verdant carpet. White daisies emerge, _Bellis perennis_ , as well as _Viola odorata_ , whose name brings with it a scent and a memory of sugared petals. An insect glides by, _Apis mellifera_ , and _damn_ it, he’s going to wake up, and he really doesn’t want to, but he can’t quite--

He wakes up. It is infinitely late at night; he’s not sure what time, but the sky outside is a perfect, cold black, the full moon shining like a red, reptilian eye. 

John is with him, curled up against Sherlock’s chest, and Sherlock can still feel the warm tingle of satisfaction from--

But that doesn’t make sense. They haven’t done those things together, so how is John with him now?

What was he dreaming? He tries to remember, but all he can find is the place where the wolf lives, a dark and echoing space like an empty cage. His arm is wrapped around John’s chest. John’s chest is...cold, God. Not moving. Is he breathing? Sherlock bolts upright as a surge of fear pulses through him. John’s face is pale and waxy, his lips bruise-blue. A dead face. 

“John!” Sherlock shakes him, but nothing changes, he still looks that way: awful, dead. Sherlock shakes him again, and John turns over, revealing four parallel lines gouged into his back, bleeding everywhere, and the bed is covered in blood, Sherlock is lying in a clammy puddle of it, and John is dead, and--

“ _John!_ ”

His own shout wakes him. Deathly silence oppresses him for a moment until he realizes that he is alone. He is clammy with sweat; he’s thrown aside John’s duvet during the night, and the sheet wraps around him like the tentacle of a sea monster. The sky outside the window is London’s familiar black-orange, starless and moonless.

A dream. It was only a dream, but the icy terror of it is still with him, and he finds that he _must_ see John. He throws off the clinging bedclothes and lurches to his feet, stumbling a little as his muscles recover from sleep. He throws on a dressing gown, then goes up the stairs, taking them two at a time, only to find that John is awake, standing in the door of his room in just a pair of boxer shorts. 

“Sherlock, what is it? I thought I heard you shout.”

Sherlock’s first impulse is to run bodily into John and wrap his arms around him, to reassure himself that John is really solid, alive and breathing. He reins himself in at the last second, stopping a few inches in front of him and reaching out to grip his shoulder. 

“Are you all right?” John asks. His eyes look wide and startled in the dim light from his bedroom. “Bad dreams?”

“I dreamed that I had...” His throat tightens; he can’t say it. He grasps John’s other shoulder, then leans his forehead against John’s, closing his eyes. 

“I think I understand,” John says. His hands come up to lie on Sherlock’s chest, then slide down and back so that Sherlock finds himself encircled and pulled close. “But Sherlock,” John’s voice is low in Sherlock’s ear. His breath is warm. “You won’t hurt me. Come on.”

He pulls Sherlock with him, back into John’s room. Sherlock does not resist, nor does he protest when John unties his dressing gown and slides it back off of his shoulders. It feels like time has slowed down. John guides Sherlock to lie down, then turns out the bedside light and gets into bed with him.

John’s bed is very warm, and John’s bare skin is warmer still as he wraps himself around Sherlock’s chilled body, holding him tightly. It feels incredibly good, like quenching an unsuspected thirst, and god, that smell, the smell of John, in all its full-moon richness. Sherlock breathes it in, letting it wash over him, and feels his consciousness settling back down into his body. The fever of the dream leaves him, and he becomes aware of his heartbeat, and of John’s quiet, steady breathing, and the night-sounds of London outside the window. 

“Thank you,” he says. 

In reply, John plants a chaste kiss on Sherlock’s shoulder. Then they lie still for a while.

“I don’t know what to do for you, sometimes,” John says. “I mean, I don’t know what’s best. If I should come after you, or leave you alone or just. I don’t know.”

Sherlock can hear pain in his voice. He’s never noticed it before, somehow. He should have noticed it.

“John, you’ve been more than...” His mouth feels dry, searching for the right words. _Accommodating. Patient. Indispensable._ He settles for covering John’s hand with his own. 

John is quiet for a moment.

“You’ll change tomorrow night,” he says, very softly.

“Yes.”

John shifts upward, and Sherlock feels every inch of skin dragging against skin as he moves. Sherlock can feel how John’s body is vibrating with tension; he can feel the warm gust of quick, unsteady breath against his ear, and the way John holds his hips back from Sherlock’s side, leaving a tantalizing space. Then one of John’s hands ghosts downward, tickling through the hair of his belly. Sherlock goes still, every sense pricked and waiting to see what will happen next.

Sherlock hears John lick his lips. 

“I know you didn’t come in here for sex,” he says. 

It seems an odd apposition at first: the impending change, John’s desire for sex. But wasn’t Sherlock just dreaming about sex? And why _did_ he come in here? He was afraid, and sought connection. Perhaps John also is afraid.

“I don’t want to pressure you,” John goes on, “But, god, you have to know that I--”

“John.” Sherlock twists to kiss him, and John meets his mouth with a tiny indrawn gasp. After a moment, Sherlock lays his hand on the back of John’s where it is fidgeting against the skin below his navel. He interlaces his fingers with John’s, then moves both their hands together to wrap and hold. John makes a small, indefinable sound, then closes the gap to press needfully against him. Sherlock releases John’s hand and pushes back against him, and the languid, enveloping heat of it is enough to surprise a groan from his lips. He does so badly need his John. 

Rationally, he knows he shouldn’t be here; he can feel the Wolf within him, whispering cruel suggestions. But it seems to be separate from his true self, a jumble of crooked perceptions that he can shove into a corner and ignore. Much more immediate is the memory of his first dream, like a crystalline shell that holds him in the realm of sensation: John holding him, John’s fingers on his hot flesh. He turns in John’s arms, which breaks the contact with John’s hand, but results in a far sweeter alignment of their bodies. John kisses him, and he sinks deeper into the memory of the dream. But he can’t let go yet; there’s something he’s supposed to say. What is it? 

“You must--ah,” he whispers. It’s nearly impossible to string words together when John is touching him like this, running warm hands down his back, gripping his buttocks to pull him closer. 

“Hm?” says John, mouth full of the skin of Sherlock’s neck. 

“You must be careful,” Sherlock manages, at last. _Careful of me,_ is what he means. Careful not to be hurt. 

“I’m always careful,” John says. This is a lie, but it makes them both smile, and Sherlock manages to regain some sense of coherence. John is here, John loves him. They are having sex, and that is immediately, shockingly delightful. _Yes._

Sherlock rolls onto his back, pulling John to lie on top of him. John spreads his knees to either side of Sherlock’s legs, kissing him all the while, and when John flexes his hips Sherlock can feel how their twin erections lie together in the close, hot juncture of their bodies. He reaches down to squeeze and stroke, which makes John release his mouth to gasp and hunch against him. Sherlock throws his head back, arching backward so that John’s kisses land on his sternum. His focus narrows to the sensation of flesh sliding against hot flesh. Some day, he will treat John gently; he will trace every curve and fold of him with exquisite care, with fingers and lips and tongue. Right now, though, he wants this: the pugilistic contact of muscle and bone, the sweat and mutual striving, the weight and heat and _life_ that make up John.

Sweet, solid John; he pushes himself up to rest on his hands, the better to piston his hips against Sherlock’s. Sherlock reaches out his free hand, and John takes it, interlacing his fingers fiercely with Sherlock’s and pressing his hand to the mattress. For a dizzying second, the scent of John is replaced by a heavy waft of green earth; Sherlock releases their cocks so that John can take his other hand, and _this_ is how it will be, this perfect physical system of their hips rocking together, this stunning proof of all the laws of nature. When John’s feet hook inward over Sherlock’s knees, he becomes a simple machine, a lever tilting seamlessly against the perfect fulcrum of John, his lover, his fitting counterpart.

“I love you,” John is saying. “God, Sherlock, I love you so much.”

Sherlock doesn’t have words to respond, so he only grips John’s hands more tightly. The point of their bodies’ contact feels radiantly sweet, as though pleasure could be transmitted through John’s skin directly into Sherlock’s own. And then John is leaning down over him, and John’s mouth is kissing his skin, and Sherlock feels that he is simultaneously sinking into the earth and surging upward as he cries out his pleasure. Even in the midst of his ecstasy, Sherlock can feel the way John shudders and gasps against his sweat-slick body, breathing Sherlock’s name, and Sherlock holds his hands through it, feeling the heat of his body and noting each new scent that springs forth in his sweat and in his seed. 

When John lies spent atop him, Sherlock frees his hands, and wraps his arms around the smooth, supple column of John’s waist. 

“John.” His voice sounds low in his own ears, husky as though with long disuse. “I love you.” That doesn’t quite convey what he intended, so he goes on. “I’ve loved you since the first day we met.” He hopes that’s enough to make John understand how much he’s wanted this, how many times he’s lain awake at night and wished for exactly this, how little he dared hope that he would have it.

John looks up at him, and his smile, beneath his sex-tousled hair, is sweet and ever so slightly sad. He understands, of course he does.

“I’m sorry I was too dim to realize I felt the same,” he says. “But I did, you know.”

Sherlock doesn’t want to admit out loud that he didn’t know, so he only answers with a kiss.

***

They don’t sleep, afterwards. It’s near enough to dawn, anyhow, and John is acutely aware that this is the morning of Sherlock’s last day before the change. After they’ve lain in their own glorious mess long enough that getting permanently stuck together feels like a credible threat, he suggests they take a shower together. Sherlock is oddly reluctant.

“I like the way we smell,” he finally admits.

John chuckles. “Well, if you want to go through your day with a belly-button full of spunk, I guess that’s your business. I’m going to get cleaned up, though.” He kisses Sherlock’s mouth, which still feels like a delicious liberty. “Come downstairs with me, though?” 

Sherlock follows him downstairs and, as it turns out, into the shower. They wash together, then stand in the steam for a long while. Sherlock takes a good long look at the scar on John’s left shoulder, not neglecting to prod it from several angles. John, for his part, discovers a delightful constellation of benign moles on Sherlock’s back, which he traces with his fingers. When he slides to touch the one beneath the outer edge of Sherlock’s scapula, Sherlock shies away, ticklish, and John laughs. 

Afterward, they crawl back into John’s bed, and Sherlock holds him close, lying over and around him, seemingly determined to rub against his skin until his own smell comes back from beneath the scent of soap and water. John does not mind this in the least, as rubbing up against Sherlock has been high on his list of desires for quite a while now.

It would be nice, John thinks, if they had more time. But what a silly idea: surely they have all the time in the world. There’s just this night to get through, and then the one or two days after while they carry out the plan. They’ve done madder things in their time, surely; everything will be all right. John shoves his fears aside, and focuses on enjoying the attentions of Sherlock, who is just now nuzzling the hollow of John’s belly with considerable enthusiasm

Sherlock has just moved on from nuzzling to licking--amazing, attentive, hair-raisingly sexy licking--when John’s phone buzzes. He ignores it, but a few minutes later it goes off again, and he grudgingly reaches out a hand to grab it from the bedside table. It’s a call from the clinic, and he finds that he can’t quite just ignore it.

“Doctor Watson? It’s Rose.”

“Mm,” says John. With Sherlock’s teeth at work just below his left nipple, he’s not feeling particularly talkative.

“I’m so sorry to bother you on your day off, but we were hoping you could come in.”  “It’s...not really a good time.” Understatement of the century, John thinks.

“Well it’s...to tell you the truth, we’re a bit desperate. Doctor Klein slipped and broke her arm last night, Doctor Greene is still out with that staph infection, and Doctor Frey is stranded at the airport.”

“Hm,” says John, fighting to keep his voice steady as Sherlock does something surprisingly nice involving the crease of his underarm. “What about...hm...Jacobsen?” 

“Still on maternity leave, I’m afraid. Doctor Gilchrist was supposed to be on call, but nobody can get hold of him. You’re literally the only MD available, and there are a couple of urgent care cases already in the waiting room. We could send them across town I suppose--”   
“No,” says John, covering his eyes with one hand. “No it’s...fine. When is Frey supposed to be in?”

“Two o’clock, he said, at the latest.”

“That’ll do,” John says. “I need to be gone by two thirty.” He needs to be home by 3:30 so that he can accompany Sherlock to the “secure location” that Mycroft has offered to let him use for his transformation. Mycroft is sending a car for them at four o’clock.

“Oh, thank goodness!” says Rose. “Thank you. I’ll see you soon.”

John hangs up, and heroically resists the urge to grumble.

“Duty calls,” Sherlock says, sounding amused at John’s expense.

“Will you be all right?” John asks. “I mean, honestly. If you need me to stay, I’ll stay.”

“I’ll be fine,” Sherlock says airily, from somewhere in the vicinity of John’s quadratus lumborum.

“Prat. You’re probably just waiting for me to go out so you can get back to your experiments.”

“Hn,” Sherlock chuckles, and then pulls some sort of martial arts move that results in John lying on his back with Sherlock on top of him. Sherlock kisses him deeply, a long, hard, claiming kiss that makes John want to bare his soft underbelly. But just as he’s seriously starting to consider calling Rose back to beg off, Sherlock releases his mouth to rumble in his ear:

“Hurry back.”

***

John hurries. The need to get back to Sherlock is an almost physical pull all morning long, and he’s unspeakably relieved when the tardy Doctor Frey arrives at one o’clock. John changes quickly back into his civilian clothes, then gives Rose a somewhat perfunctory wave on his way out. He jogs toward the tube station, wanting to catch the earliest possible train. 

He’s still a few hundred yards from the tube entrance when someone takes his arm. 

“Doctor Watson,” says a voice.

“What is it?” John says, but then there’s a stinging sensation in the side of his neck, and things start to go hazy.

***

Sherlock does reasonably well, considering. He spends the day in John’s bed. Around noon, he crawls out to get a cup of tea, then puts on one of John’s undershirts along with his own pajama bottoms. Then he gets back into the bed. He can feel the fever creeping in around the edges of his consciousness, but he breathes deeply, hiding in the darkness under blankets that smell of sex and John, and things are not too unbearable. It feels a bit like being on a not-quite-adequate dose of codeine after oral surgery: he knows the pain is there, but if he concentrates on other things he can just about function in spite of it. Morphine might do the job, he thinks. Pity there’s none in the house.

At two o’clock, he gets up to pace. Pacing is quite therapeutic. Perhaps in the future he and John can go for walks together.

At 3:25, he is still pacing. John will be home any moment. Sex also would be therapeutic, he muses. Although, actually, he’s not sure it was a good idea to be physical with John so close to the full moon. (And as he thinks of it, the memory sends a sudden spike of desire through his abdomen.) This morning was all right, but if John were here now, it would be...unpredictable. Of course, John is going to be here any minute, and he will no doubt greet Sherlock with kisses. Sherlock dwells on this for a while.

It is 3:32. He ought to be here by now, but sometimes there are delays on the tube, sometimes the crowds are dense enough to make everything take just that little bit longer. Still, he ought to be here. The door ought to be opening soon, there ought to be footsteps on the stairs.

Sherlock distracts himself. He runs over the plans for the upcoming days in his mind: in the morning, he will call Flannagan, using the same phone number she called him from before. She won’t answer, but she will call back almost immediately, from a different number. He will lead her to believe that he is terrified and desperate for the assistance of someone who knows anything about werewolves. It’s a little unclear how she will interpret this: she may not know that he had Mason at his house. More likely, she will know he was there, in which case she will either think he is _still_ there, where the tracking device is, or she will correctly deduce that Mason and the RFID capsule are no longer necessarily co-located. These specifics will determine how careful Sherlock will need to be, and what story he needs to maintain throughout the encounter, but they won’t change the basic outcome, which is that she will tell Sherlock where to go to be taken to the facility. 

Once there, he will have to play along with whatever scenario arises: she may play the gracious hostess, she may have him drugged, she may simply imprison him. There are contingency plans for all of these scenarios. In any case, he will use his observational abilities (and if necessary, his wit and charm), to learn all he can about the operation. Then he will cause trouble.

It is 3:45. Where is John? Sherlock texts him.

3:50. Sherlock calls John’s phone number. The phone rings five times, then goes to voicemail. His phone isn’t turned off, then, but why doesn’t he answer?

3:53. Sherlock calls the number again. The phone rings four times, then picks up. “John,” Sherlock says, but in answer he receives only staticky noise: thumping music in the background, the voice of a radio announcer; the white rush of cars passing in traffic. Then a voice, male, nearby: _You going to keep still?_

 _Yeah_ , says John’s voice, _fine_. There’s a rustling sound, a thud, and then--nothing. The phone disconnects.

Sherlock stands stock still, mobile still held to his ear. It is 3:55. _Fuck._

He has only moments to decide. The Wolf is terribly close, now, a livid bubble distending the thin boundary of his consciousness. Mycroft’s car will be outside in four minutes and thirty seconds. 

He decides. He flips through his phone’s history. His calls the number. It rings three times, then blanks. He hangs up. A moment later, the mobile buzzes.

“Mr. Holmes.” A male voice answers, suave and collected, not the same voice he heard from John’s phone. 

“Tell me,” Sherlock says. 

“There is a black car three quarters of a mile from your flat,” the voice says. “Before it arrives, you will exit by the front door. Head to Melcombe street. Take your first left. The vehicle is a white BMW.”

The call hangs up. Sherlock dresses quickly. He goes for his coat, then thinks better of it and goes to his closet. Among the disguises at the back, he finds a worn denim jacket, which he dons, as well as a black billed cap. The RFID capsule is lying on the kitchen counter, and Sherlock drops it into his trouser pocket before going out. As he makes the turn on Melcombe, he sees the shiny muzzle of a black car swinging around the opposite corner. He jogs, turns right. The BMW is there, engine running. The back passenger door opens. Sherlock gets in.


	10. At the Slightest Touch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter you will find the end of the story; that is, the climax and denouement. There's still an epilogue coming.
> 
> Thanks once again to my beta readers, [Ruth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruth0007/pseuds/Ruth0007), and the hyphen-slaying [MojoFlower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MojoFlower/pseuds/MojoFlower), who are responsible for some major improvements.

John regains consciousness beneath a wash of loud, static-laced techno that makes it feel like he is moving. It takes a few moments for him to sort out the sensations and realize that, yes, he actually _is_ in motion. He is curled up on his side with his hands cuffed behind him, in some sort of vehicle. 

He feels a wave of panic flow over him, followed instantly by a wave of calm. Abducted. Presumably by Flannagan’s people. All right, then. He’s been in worse situations. He can do this. 

Opening his eyes, the first thing he sees is a man, square-faced and clean shaven; he looks strong but not smart, and John feels that he would dislike him no matter what the circumstances of their meeting. The man is perched on the wheel well of what appears to be a van. It’s a barebones affair, the sort of thing one might use to transport animals: all unpainted metal, the windows darkly tinted and covered over with rigid steel mesh. The same mesh separates the back compartment from the front seats. John can’t see anything of the driver except his elbow.

Squareface notices that John’s eyes are open. 

“Oi, Bill. He’s awake.” He has to practically shout to be heard over the repellent music.

Bill doesn’t answer. Squareface looks John over with apparent satisfaction, but makes no attempt at small talk.

John weighs his options. He doesn’t dare sit up enough to look out the windows, but he suspects that they have left London. Even from his position on the floor, he ought to be able to see tall buildings going by, but there’s nothing, just mostly-cloudy sky. From the color and angle of the light, it seems to be late afternoon. Sherlock will be wondering where he is. Fuck, Sherlock will be changing in a matter of a very few hours. John can’t suppress an involuntary writhe of his body. He pulls his hands apart, testing the cuffs. One of them is a bit loose, loose enough to slide over the bone of his wrist and chafe around the heel of his hand. That’s good news. He files it away for the moment when it will be useful. 

“You keep fidgetin’, I’ll put a stop to it, understand?” says John’s companion. To clarify his point, he pulls out a handgun and brandishes it in John’s direction. John holds his eye defiantly, until the man looks away, but he does keep still.

The ride goes on in relative calm. John doesn’t mind not moving; there’s nothing else he needs to do right now. Why have they taken him? What have they told Sherlock? Perhaps he’s already with Mycroft; John sends up a fervent prayer that it is so.

His phone buzzes inside his pocket, and his heart sinks. It could only be Sherlock, wondering where John is. He holds perfectly still while the phone rings out; the music is loud enough that John can’t hear the phone at all, so it’s obvious that Squareface can’t hear it either.

Sherlock is trying to contact him, which is actually seriously _not good_ if it means that he hasn’t yet made it to a safe environment. John’s heart pounds as he holds himself tense, both hoping and fearing that Sherlock will call again. When the phone goes off the second time, the vibration reminds him of the phone’s stupid habit of dialing out while still in his pocket, which means that if he squirms in the right way, he should be able to push some of the buttons, maybe get the line to pick up and give Sherlock at least a clue as to where he’s gone. He shifts slowly from side to side, trying not to attract the notice of the man with the gun. The phone stops ringing just as Squareface notices John wriggling. Angrily, he bends to grip the back of John’s neck. John allows his head to be forced to the floor, and feels the muzzle of the gun pressed cold against his temple. 

“You going to keep still?” he asks. 

“Yeah,” says John. “Fine.”

The man knocks John’s head against the floor hard enough to make his ears ring. John silently vows revenge, and waits.

An age later, John feels the van slowing, stopping. The front window rolls down, presumably so that the driver can present his ID to a guard. Then they trundle onward, and soon afterward the evening light of the English countryside is replaced by cold fluorescent bulbs as they descend, a concrete tunnel rising up to swallow John’s view of the sky. The radio dissolves into static, and the driver turns it off. Without the thumping noise of the radio, a strange sort of intimacy descends. John can hear his own breathing, harsh with tension. 

He runs through the facility plans in his head, thankful that he went to the effort of memorizing the documents Mycroft sent. They’ll be heading into an underground car park, which means they’ve entered from the west side. This part of the facility is mainly underground, with only air vents to the surface. The only exits are back this way, through the car park and tunnel, or an elevator at the far end that leads up into the deceptively small office building that is the facility’s only surface-visible structure. Here, underground, are six vast levels of laboratories, offices, and what appear to be residential facilities, as well as other spaces whose function John and Sherlock could not guess. John expects they’ll be taking him to a section he and Sherlock have dubbed “the dungeon”, for its twin rows of tiny cubicles, about two meters square, each hooked into the plumbing and surveillance grids. 

The van pulls into a parking space, and stops. The driver gets out, then comes around to unlock the back doors with a jangling set of keys. Flat light floods in.

“Up you get,” says Squareface, prodding John with a boot. John rolls up to a crouch. He considers bowling outward, knocking down the driver, and making a run for it. He could probably get his hand free and take on Squareface without too much trouble. But then his eyes fall on the driver, and he thinks better of it: this man is lean and sharp looking, alert yet relaxed, strong in the manner of a panther. John knows a trained killer when he sees one. He feigns shakiness, allows himself to be bundled out of the van like a terrified victim. Now is not the moment.

“Behaving yourself?” asks the driver, eyes traveling over John, assessing him.

“Like a lamb,” says Squareface.

“Good enough,” says the driver. “We’re to take him to the office first, then to Intake once Doctor F’s done with him.”

They march John through a keycard-secured entrance, then down a stairwell to the level below. The halls are floored in spotless white tile, utilitarian but very new. Security cameras are present, but not conspicuous, just tiny glassed-over bubbles at the hallway junctions. John notes with satisfaction that the locations match what he saw on the plans.

There are few other people in evidence. They pass by one man walking in the opposite direction, a clipboard under his arm while his attention is focused on handheld. Later, John catches a glimpse of two people wearing scrubs as they round a corner. The place is lightly staffed, it seems. That’s all to the good, as far as John is concerned.

They reach what must be Dr. Flannagan’s office, though the door appears little different from scores of others they’ve passed by. The driver taps on the door, then opens it in answer to a call from within. Although John’s mind is mostly focused on plotting his escape, he can’t help being just a bit curious about the woman who has plotted all of this and rivaled the machinations of Mycroft Holmes.

The office is large, but relatively spartan, apart from a framed musical score on one wall. When John catches sight of the woman sitting behind the desk, he wonders whether he’s misunderstood. This woman is rather young, certainly under forty. She’s quite pretty, actually, with red hair pulled back from her face. She’s leaned far back in her chair, focused on a large computer screen as she clicks a mouse, the fingers of her other hand entangled in a long bead necklace which she rubs absently against her lower lip. She takes a moment to finish what she’s doing before looking up at the newcomers with a pleasantly expectant expression. Her eyes crinkle with a smile when she sees John. 

“Just have a seat and I’ll be right with you.”

John finds it a bit ludicrous to be treated as an ordinary guest while wearing handcuffs, but Squareface steps aside so that John can get to a chrome-and-plastic chair in one corner of the room. He sits down gingerly on the edge of the seat, arms bunched uncomfortably behind him. The woman saves her work with a flourish, then, without standing up, rolls her desk chair over to where John is sitting, high heeled shoes tapping on the white floor. She’s an odd mixture of poise and awkwardness, John thinks, her knees pressed together in a tan pencil skirt, her coral beads hanging slightly askew. She leans forward to examine him intently.

“So you’re the one,” she says, clearly pleased. “Aren’t people funny?” She tilts her head, giving John a fond smile.

“Sorry?” he says at last. 

“Do you know why I’ve brought you here, John?”

“No,” he says, slowly. He had supposed he knew, but the way she’s looking at him, with a mixture of patience and pity, makes him suspect that things are more complicated.

“You must have a theory, though,” she says. “You probably think you were brought here to lure Sherlock into my hands.” She tilts her head, giving him the opportunity to confirm or deny. This is what he thought, but he stays quiet. She shakes her head as though he had answered.

“Oh, no, John, you’re far more than bait. If all I needed was Sherlock’s bodily presence, don’t you think I could have captured him before now? Don’t you think my people could have walked up to him in a public place and taken him, the way they did you? I assure you, it would not have been difficult.”

She pauses, waiting for John to prompt her to go on. The pause lengthens, until John decides it’s more important to hear this than it is to maintain whatever theoretical upper hand he’s trying to get by remaining silent.

“All right,” he says, “Why didn’t you?”

“Because we needed to wait until we were _sure_ ,” she says, leaning back as though it gives her great satisfaction to explain. 

“I don’t understand,” John says. If she wants to provide dramatic exposition, he reckons he can play along.

“Let me lay it out for you, then,” she says, smiling to acknowledge his cooperation. “Every full moon, when Sherlock transforms, the wolf inside makes a bid for dominance.”

“Dominance?” John says, his mouth going suddenly dry.

“Control,” she says. “Sherlock can be mostly Sherlock, or he can be mostly a wolf. The wolf is very highly evolved, John. These past two moons, it’s been testing him, learning his weaknesses, learning what it will take to break him. I am already aware--and thus, I am sure that the wolf has realized--that Sherlock Holmes is not a man with many weaknesses, because there are not many things that Sherlock wants. I wasn’t even entirely certain that he wanted you, until last night.”

John licks dry lips. “What do you know about last night?” he says.

Flannagan leans forward, rising from her chair enough to whisper in his ear:

“I know you didn’t come in here for sex.”

For a moment he can’t fathom what she means, until he remembers those words coming from his own lips the night before, and his stomach twists with disgust. She heard what he and Sherlock said to each other. Watched them together, maybe.

“You see,” she says, leaning back to smile at him over the rims of her glasses. “I know that he loves you.”

“And why does that matter?” John asks, fighting to keep his voice steady.

“Because what Sherlock wants, the wolf wants to destroy. With Sherlock’s third transformation, the wolf should be strong enough to take over, given the right sort of leverage. And you, John, will be that leverage.”

“You’re going to let him kill me,” John says. 

“Oh yes,” she says. “I think it’ll do the job, don’t you?”

John is still struggling to find a reply when Flannagan’s computer pings a “new email” notification. She rolls back over to look at it, then says, without looking up, “Jackson, I need to you to go up to receiving.”

“Yes, ma’am,” says the driver. His gaze flicks over John and Squareface before he leaves the room. John offers up a silent prayer of gratitude to have him gone: if he’s left alone with Squareface, he’s pretty sure he can get free. He holds his breath, hoping against hope that Flannagan will make this easy.

She says nothing for several minutes, just clicks through emails with an expression of faint annoyance. Finally, she gives a put-upon sigh.

“Ugh, this is useless. Cartwright, you may as well take John over to Intake for processing. I’ve seen what I needed to see, anyway. Goodbye, John.”

Squareface--Cartwright--jumps to attention, while John cheers inwardly. He manhandles John to a standing position, then takes his arm, and chivvies him down the hall. John walks calmly, just waiting for the moment when Cartwright can’t see his hands. At the end of the hall, they come to a door where Cartwright has to swipe his ID. The swipe doesn’t work on the first try (it’s rather awkward using his left hand), and his attention goes to the device. While he’s distracted, John takes his right thumb in his left hand and yanks hard. The joint dislocates with a sickening pop and a jolt pain of that sends a welcome burst of adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream. Gritting his teeth, he starts working the loose cuff over his hand.

Cartwright finally gets the beep that means the door is unlocked. John holds his breath, straining, willing the ring of steel to slide over his knuckles. It scrapes his skin raw, but he hardly feels it. Nearly there...just a little further--

Just as Cartwright puts his hand to the door, it swings open, pulled from the other side. Cartwright is forced to stand back as a pair of uniformed men stride through with no attention to spare for lesser beings, and that gives John the final few seconds he needs to get his throbbing, smarting hand free of the cuff. He catches it with his fingers so that it won’t dangle, holding it carefully as he pops his thumb joint back into place. 

That hurts far more than popping it out did, and John can’t suppress a faint hiss, but Cartwright, bless his stupid arse, goes through the door first, turning back to grab John as an afterthought. John follows him through into a new zone: the hallway here is carpeted in an industrial pinkish tan, with brass light fixtures and a plastic potted plant visible at the end of the hall. John’s eyes take all of this in, but none of it matters; the crucial fact is that they are alone. He makes his move.

Cartwright is no doubt very surprised to find John’s arms wrapped around his neck from behind. He lurches from side to side, trying to throw off his attacker, but John holds on, pressing the man’s windpipe hard enough that he can’t call for help. 

Unfortunately, John’s thumb is close to useless. When Cartwright’s hands come up to pry at his grip, the thumb gives way, and for a moment John feels his arms slipping free, until the fingers of his right hand catch on the dangling handcuff. He hooks his fingers into it, tenses his left arm, and pulls hard, effectively garroting Cartwright with the cuffs. He hasn’t drawn a breath for quite some time now; he must be turning purple. John holds on for a few more beats, and then feels Cartwright’s knees start to give as he loses consciousness. His weight bears the larger man to the floor. He’s done it: he’s free. Now comes the hard part: getting out.

He takes Cartwright’s gun, his ID card, and a set of keys he finds in his pocket. It looks like he has a key to the van they arrived in, which is very good news. 

No sooner has he pocketed his loot than a shrill alarm goes off somewhere nearby. There’s no point in going back through the door toward Flannagan’s office, so John goes forward. There should be a stairwell nearby--yes, he sees the number 3 painted on the wall beside a glass-windowed door. He swipes Cartwright’s card, and is immeasurably relieved when it works on the first try. As he’s opening the door, he hears a beep from the door where he’s left Cartwright. He goes into the stairwell as running footsteps approach.

The stairs go two ways: up and down. Up would be the obvious path of escape, so John goes down. He and Sherlock had theorized that there could be dead spots in the surveillance coverage at certain points on the stairwells, so he heads for one of these, hoping to buy a few seconds. He waits, heart pounding, as the door above opens, footsteps come in, pause, and...go upward. He sags in relief, stands listening until the sound fades, then follows them, moving as quickly and quietly as he can. The way out should be one level up: he climbs, then lets himself out in another pink-carpeted hallway, the twin of the one he left behind. He follows it around a corner, and sure enough, there’s another doorway out to the white tiled section. 

Cartwright’s ID card works again (and really, it speaks of very loose discipline on the security team’s part, if they haven’t depermissioned it by now), and then there’s nothing he can do but run and hope. He navigates by memory and instinct, hoping anyone he runs into won’t be wise to the security breach in progress; at one point he hears footsteps approaching and, having no better plan, simply slows to a walk, trying to look as though he belongs and knows where he’s going. The short, middle aged woman he passes hardly gives him a second glance. When she’s out of sight, he takes off running again.

Heart in his throat, he can see the exit to the car park up ahead, a sort of minimal lobby where a security guard is meant to stand. It’s abandoned right now--presumably the guard has joined in the chase--and John can hardly believe his good fortune as he barrels the last hundred meters, Cartwright’s card out in his hand. He’s halfway there...three quarters...seven eighths...

 _Shit._ Four armed security guards emerge from a side hallway. One is using a walkie-talkie, his eyes fixed firmly on John. Guns are being drawn, and he just does not have time for this. He puts his head down, slams the card through the reader, shoulders open the door, and he’s...free! He dashes through the car park; as far as he knows, the next physical barrier he has to pass is a gate some distance from the tunnel entrance. It’s just a matter of whether these dunces can mobilize their forces before John gets under cover. He hasn’t seen any more staff of Jackson’s type--only these sort of corporate drones--but he knows his chances of escape will fall to near zero once the heavy artillery gets involved.

Praying to anyone who will listen, he runs. He hears gunshots back at the exit, but as the bullets don’t seem to have hit him, he pays them no mind. The tunnel mouth looms before him, and God, it’s...not very bright out there. Evening is coming on fast. _Please, let Sherlock be safe._

Flashing lights: the security grunts have vehicles, apparently. But when John comes out of the tunnel into the open, he notices something that is very, very good news: the property above the facility is rather densely wooded, probably in an attempt to have it look undisturbed from the air. This is no doubt quite effective at hiding their activities from aerial view, but it presents a serious risk when it comes to on-the-ground security, as John is about to demonstrate. The moment he’s free of the tunnel entrance, he darts sideways, off of the pavement. He has to run across an open area, but it’s not nearly enough space for those following to get a proper bead on him. Between the dim twilight and the cover of trees, he’s fairly confident in his ability to disappear.

It’s at about this moment that he realizes he doesn’t have much of a plan besides getting free. He still has his mobile, which is something; he keeps moving into the trees as he pulls it out and dials Sherlock’s number. It goes straight to voicemail, which is no worse than he expected, but he curses at it anyway. He tries Mycroft, and is gratified by the speed with which he answers.

“John, where are you? Where is Sherlock?”

John’s footsteps stutter to a halt, but his self-preservation instincts kick in just enough that he remembers to get his back to a tree.

“He’s not with you?” 

“No,” Mycroft says, sounding bitter. “Are you telling me you left him alone?”

“Christ,” John says. “Christ, just...fucking help me, Mycroft. Flannagan’s guys drugged me, picked me up, I’m outside of London somewhere, southwest I think. Flannagan’s planning to bring Sherlock here and have him kill me.”

There’s a chilly pause. 

“I take it you have managed to extricate yourself?”

“I...sort, of yeah. I’m in the woods. I have a gun.”

“That will do, for the moment. Is Sherlock there yet?”  

“I’m not sure,” John says. “I don’t think so. God, Mycroft, it’s almost dark.”

“Stay calm, John. All will be well.”

John would like to tell him where to stick _that_ advice, but Mycroft disconnects, and doesn’t pick up again when John calls back. John curses vehemently. He’s shoving the phone back into his pocket when he notices a new set of lights swinging down the drive outside the woods. The searchers are some way off to one side of the woods, not likely to find John any time soon, so he approaches the edge of the trees cautiously to watch the approaching vehicle. It is a white sedan, utterly civilian looking, the sort of car that would have no trouble blending in on busy London streets. 

One of the security cars with flashing lights is parked across the tunnel entrance, the driver standing outside with a torch. The white sedan has to stop and talk to him; John can see the torch waving wildly as the man explains the situation...and that’s when the back passenger door opens, and someone stumbles out. A beam of light crosses Sherlock’s lean silhouette, and that’s all it takes to set John moving.

It must be hard for them to see John in the twilight, because he’s practically on top of Sherlock when the shouting starts. He barrels into Sherlock hard enough to knock him off balance, but seizes his arm before he can fall and starts dragging him toward the woods. Sherlock’s legs start moving. They are running.

They are right at the edge of the trees when it happens. Sherlock stops dead, causing John’s weak hand to jerk free. John whirls to catch him again, but Sherlock looks...bad. He’s bending unnaturally at the waist, hands pressed to his thighs. His mouth is moving, opening and closing strangely as though he has to gape his jaw open to draw breath. John advances toward him, but Sherlock swats his hand away. 

“John, I’m...” He shakes his head as though trying to dislodge something, and then his eyes fix on John, and John can tell, even in the darkness, that they are not Sherlock’s eyes. 

“You had better run,” Sherlock says, but it’s a growl, and there’s a strange sort of relish in it, as though this creature will be quite delighted to see John fleeing for his life.

“Sherlock, no,” John says. “Please, just a little longer--”

But Sherlock is not listening to him; he’s doubled over, clawing at his clothing as though its touch is burning him. John’s horrified fascination is only broken by the sweep of a torch beam: they’ve been noticed. Three men are advancing on them, and these aren’t the basic security grunts. They are men of Jackson’s type, trained and stealthy, rifles raised and held rock steady. Even with Cartwright’s pistol, there’s no way John can take all three of them out before one of them gets a shot off. Ignoring Sherlock’s obvious agony, he grabs him and pulls him into the trees.

In the woods, things become confusing. Sherlock lets out a snarl that is unlike anything John has heard before, and he releases him in pure shock. John is still standing frozen by the conflicting urges to stay with Sherlock and to get the hell away from _this thing_ when the light of a rifle sight cuts through the darkness, flickering over Sherlock’s...pelt. _Shit._ Luckily, Sherlock notices the light as well, and whirls to face it. John sees a flash of teeth--not human teeth--and hears a low, rumbling growl. _Shit shit shit_ , goes a part of his mind, but he shoves that part aside with an ease born of long practice. Sherlock’s dramatic presence should keep the gunmen from noticing one meek army doctor sidling around in the shadows. 

John’s stolen gun is in his hands, solid and dependable. He gets a clear line of sight on one of the gunmen; from the angle, John thinks it’s his sight pointed at Sherlock. John raises his gun, and fires.

The effects are immediate and varied. First, the gunman drops, which sends a familiar, cold satisfaction through John’s body, as though his bones have been replaced with finely-milled steel. Second, the report of the shot sends the other rifle sights waving and flickering among the trees, away from Sherlock. Third, Sherlock lunges forward. Distracted, the gunman has no chance of defending himself, and he falls with a sickening sound of rending flesh. That draws the attention of the third gunman, whose torch-sight flamboyantly betrays his position. John pulls the trigger again, and then there is only the wolf. 

The wolf--Sherlock--has torn the second gunman’s guts out. No chance he’ll be coming back as another werewolf, then, for which John feels grateful on Sherlock’s behalf. The wolf is...eating. The sickening sight sends a jolt of pure anger through him and he decides, with cold certainty, that he will get Sherlock out of this or die trying. 

Blood on the animal’s lips. He can’t watch any more.

“Sherlock,” he calls out. The wolf turns its head, its face a blotch of shadow, and it growls, low and threatening. It raises its muzzle, sniffing the air, and then a red tongue emerges to lick over the butcher’s nightmare of its teeth with lascivious anticipation.

The hairs stand up on the back of John’s neck. He runs.

In the darkness, John stumbles over roots. He feels thin branches sting against his face, the undergrowth clawing at his clothing, but he takes no notice, driven forward not by fear, but by the certainty that the wolf _will_ kill him, if it can. He needs to find a refuge. He could climb a tree, perhaps, but in the dark he can’t tell which ones are climbable. 

After what seems like an eternity of running, he slams noisily into something: a chain link fence, ten feet high and topped with razor wire. Not happening. He adjusts his course, narrowly missing a sizable tree trunk, and then he’s back in the deep shadows. He blunders into a small, icy stream, and out the other side. He is beginning to tire, but the wolf is behind him all the while, never catching up, never falling behind. 

_It’s playing with me,_ he realizes. _It can have me any time it likes._

Suddenly, he blunders into the open again, into a small clearing in the trees. The light of the full moon is almost blinding after the blackness of the woods. There’s a little rise in the ground here, a hillock that some part of him registers as defensible terrain. He climbs it, then turns to face his pursuer.

Before him stands the wolf. It is long and lean, black furred, four legged, not a wolf-man or a man-wolf but an actual beast, full and in the flesh. The moonlight streaming down into the clearing drowns in the depths of its inky pelt, but gleams cold blue on its teeth and in its wide, wild eyes. Baring its teeth, it slinks around the base of John’s territory, its eyes never leaving John’s own. 

John sees how the wolf repositions itself, its muscles bunching in preparation for sudden, lethal movement. John lifts his weapon, taking careful aim. The animal lunges. John pulls the trigger.

The wolf’s momentum carries it through its lunge despite the bullet that tears through flesh and bone. John deflects the toothy maw from his face with one arm as the wolf’s weight slams into him. He drops to the ground with it, grappling. Even injured, the wolf is angry and frightfully strong, and it’s all he can do to pin it with his weight, his hands sliding frantically over blood-slick fur. Lying across the wolf’s ribcage, he wraps an arm around its neck to keep the jaws from his face. He can feel the hind claws scrabbling against his jeans, trying to dislodge him.

“Stay still, you stupid bugger,” John cries, and his voice sounds desperate in his own ears, on the edge of sobbing. He has no way of knowing how badly he’s injured the creature or exactly where the bullet hit. The fact that it’s still able breathe normally is a positive sign, but it would be all too easy for a shard of bone to puncture a lung with all of this thrashing about, and that could rapidly spell the end. He has the creature pinned, for now, but if it keeps testing his hold, his strength will give out.

“Sherlock, please, if you can hear me. Please.”

The beast growls low in its throat. Changing tack, it tries to thrash its head in the direction of its injured shoulder, and its growl cuts to a sharp wine of pain.

“You’re hurt,” John tells it. “Please, you’ll die if don’t keep still. God, please!”

But the wolf struggles in his hold for a long time. He needs to get pressure on the wound to keep it from bleeding out, but he can’t risk releasing the creature’s head to do it. Finally, when John’s muscles are quivering with fatigue, the resistance against his hold begins to weaken, and he knows that the loss of blood is having its effect, the wolf beginning to lose consciousness. The creature’s head goes slack. Shaking, he lets go. He checks that the wolf’s airway is clear, then examines the wound as best he can in the darkness: ventral entry, dorsal exit, not much more he can tell right now. Quickly, he strips out of his jacket and his button-down, then ties the shirt as tightly as he can around the two wounds, making a kind of harness around the wolf’s chest. It’s not much. It’s almost nothing. He presses his hands to the wounds.

Time passes at an agonizing crawl. Far off in the woods, John can see lights flashing, can hear voices shouting, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do if they find him before help arrives ( _if help arrives_ , a small voice whispers), but until it happens he can’t spare any attention from the task of keeping the wolf alive. He breathes with it, willing its body to inhale and exhale, willing its heart to beat.

In the wee hours of the morning, he hears the sound of helicopters.

***

Sherlock awakes in poppyland. He can tell from the tone of his receding dreams, and from the precise way in which his shoulder doesn’t hurt, that he’s been given high quality intravenous opiates. Unexpected, but by no means objectionable. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he floats.

Someone is holding his hand...his left hand, if such a concept has any meaning. Someone is whispering his name. That could be what’s woken him, a voice like a rope extending downward into darkness and upward into light. He takes hold of the rope. He opens his eyes.

It’s John, holding his hand. He’s so extremely happy to see John that a smile wells up through the drug haze, bursting over his face like a bubble of something sticky. He can feel it pulling all the muscles of his cheeks and jaw. He raises both their hands together to feel John’s stubbled cheek with the back of a finger. 

“John,” he says. “Your face is all a muddle.”

John’s face only gets more muddled at that. If he weren’t drugged, Sherlock could probably analyze the component expressions, but for now it just looks...mixed up. Sad, actually. He’d have to go with sad.

“Why are you sad?”

John presses the back of Sherlock’s hand to his cheek for a moment before he answers.

“Do you remember what happened last night?” John asks.

“Do I?” Does he? Sherlock rifles through his most recent memories. He and John had sex, which was fantastic and something he would like to do again as soon as possible, then there was a phone call, then he...

Yes. The Wolf. A ride in a strange car. John hurtling out of the woods. John...right next to him, as his thoughts became the Wolf’s thoughts. 

“You were with me,” he says. John nods against his hand. His eyes widen at the memory, a twitch of panic tweaking the nose of the morphine. “What happened?”

John closes his eyes before he answers.

“I shot you,” he says.

That’s quite a funny thing to say. Sherlock laughs, which...which hurts, actually.

“No you didn’t,” he says.

But John isn’t laughing. 

“I did, Sherlock. Believe me.”

His eyes are very serious. Sherlock entertains the notion. His right shoulder is injured, badly enough that he’s in a hospital enjoying some quite wonderful drugs. He knows John was with him as a wolf, he knows the wolf wanted to kill John, he knows John is handy with firearms. The shoulder...John was shot in the shoulder, which means John knows how this particular injury works. He knows the risks, he knows what can be survived. If he had to injure Sherlock, if he had to incapacitate him, he would certainly have aimed for that spot--safer on the right, too, since there would be less risk of injuring the heart. It’s perfect. 

“You _did_ shoot me,” he marvels. “I wish I’d been there to see it.”

John’s face is confused again, this time because John is, himself, confused. 

“Sherlock, you...”

“Oh, John, brilliant. You are brilliant. You saved me.” Sherlock is smiling again; he can’t help it. He said he’d hurt Sherlock back, and oh, he has, in spectacular fashion. John is brilliant, John is everything. All of this he feels with exhausting immediacy, and suddenly it’s all just...too much. “I think I’d like to sleep some more, if you don’t mind,” he says, already feeling himself wrapped in the soft fleece of slumber.

“Of course I don’t mind,” John says. He is still perplexed, but he is patient, ever so much more patient than Sherlock could ever be.

“Kiss me first.”

John kisses him, just a brush of moist lips against Sherlock’s dry ones.

“Stay with me,” Sherlock says. “And stop being sad. It will all be all right. It really will.”

***

“You’ve switched your brand of tea,” Sherlock says.

John, walking in the door of the flat with the shopping, shoots a surprised look to where Sherlock is sitting propped up with pillows on the sofa.

“What makes you say that?” he asks.

“I can smell it.” Sherlock is holding his violin like a tiny guitar, fingering with his left hand and plucking the strings with his right, which is partially immobilized by a sling. He plucks out a few random notes while he lets his nose wander through the assortment of new smells that John has brought in with him. “You’ve also bought bacon, obviously, and soap, shaving foam, mint dental floss.” He plays a new note for each item on the list, rising up the scale. “Carrots, cauliflower. Something bready...whole wheat muffins? Milk. And two tins of beans.” 

“Don’t tell me you can smell the beans.”

“No, but we were out, and you always buy two.”

John huffs a laugh as he starts putting away his purchases. “Huh, well it’s good to know your old powers of deduction are still intact.”

“Naturally,” Sherlock says, a little annoyed. “You needn’t persist in treating me as an invalid, you know. It’s not as though I suffered anything very serious.”

“Nothing serious?” John finishes with the groceries and comes to sit beside Sherlock on the couch. “You do know that your scapula was shattered into eight separate pieces.”

“Could have been worse. And anyway, what am I always telling you? It’s transport. It means nothing.”

“Yes, well. That’s what everyone thinks, until...” John stops himself suddenly and looks away, his mouth twisting unhappily.

“Until what?” Sherlock’s fingers are still wandering over the strings, picking out random phrases of music as he watches John’s face.

“Until they get hurt,” John says, his voice tight. “Until your body stops being able to do the things you take for granted, and gets in your way instead.”

Sherlock stills his fingers. “You’re still feeling guilty.”

John looks at him with pain in his eyes. “How can I not? You’re probably going to have nerve pain for the rest of your life. You may never regain full use of the arm. You may not ever be able to play your violin again.”

“I’m playing it now,” Sherlock says. He means it as a joke, to show how illogical John is being, but John only gets more upset.

“You know what I mean,” he says, frustrated. “You may think it’s all fine now, but somewhere down the line, you’re going to start to hate it.”

“And you think I’ll blame you?”

“It won’t even matter if you blame me. I’ll blame myself.”

John won’t look at Sherlock at all now. He’s hugging his elbows, curling miserably inward. This must be how he’s felt all along, Sherlock realizes. Ever since the hospital. But he’s been keeping it to himself all this time, not wanting to bother Sherlock with excessive solicitude when Sherlock needs to keep a positive outlook (so John would say) in order to heal. Sherlock has been a fool not to see it.

“John.” Sherlock sets his violin aside. He knows he isn’t very skilled at giving comfort, but he hopes he can learn. Sliding closer, he uses his good arm to pull John close against him. John presses his face into Sherlock’s shoulder, sniffling. _Tired_ , Sherlock realizes. It can’t be easy having an invalid in the house, bringing him things, looking after him in every way. Tolerating his bored ranting and his atonal musical fumblings. He lowers his face to John’s hair and inhales the sweet smell of him, the close, delicate essence that is more real than anything else in the world. He speaks softly.

“If you hadn’t done this--” he has to close his eyes for a moment to shut out the image of what John’s bullet saved him from. “If I had woken up in that clearing with your blood in my mouth...it would have been the end of my life. I can’t promise I’ll never complain, but if I do you must remind me of that. Because you saved me from the worst fate that I can possibly imagine.”

“But I should have thought of something better,” John says, against Sherlock’s collarbone. “I was only trying to save myself.”  “Hmm.” Sherlock threads his fingers through the fine hair at the back of John’s neck. “And here I thought you were a good shot.”

John is still against him for a moment before rising to the bait. “What do you mean?”

“If you were only trying to protect yourself, then surely you intended to shoot me through the head, or in the heart, perhaps. Though the head would have been a safer bet, unless you’re an expert on vulpine anatomy. So if that was your goal, then clearly I must lower my estimation of your skill as a marksman. My head was a large target. It was headed straight for you.”

John shudders. “Sherlock. Don’t talk like that.”

“Then don’t be stupid, John.”

John falls silent, snugging himself a little more tightly under Sherlock’s arm. Sherlock likes having him there, in easy reach. Having this conversation is reminding him of something Mycroft told him, about how the team who raided Flannagan’s facility found him and John together just after dawn. According to Mycroft’s account, Sherlock was naked and half dead from loss of blood. John was in shock and clinging to him so tightly that the paramedics had to physically prize him free. He doesn’t remember it, not any of what must have been a long and awful night, except for two moments. The first was just as he began to change, when he looked at John through the wolf’s eyes and knew with sick certainty that the hunt was about to begin. The second was at the end, with John holding him down as his blood seeped away, just before the wolf’s body lost consciousness. 

He didn’t understand it at the time, couldn’t interpret any of the sensations bombarding him. But he’s had a lot of time to reflect on that moment, to wonder what it means that he was granted that moment of clarity. The wolf was...disappointed. Resigned. It is still with him, and still what it was, but it is warier. Wary of John, he thinks. He isn’t sure what this means, but anything that discomfits the wolf can only be good news. 

He pulls John a bit closer to drop a kiss in his hair. Then John looks up and kisses him. It’s just a comforting brush of lips at first, but it deepens quickly into something more. Sherlock’s body awakens to remind him of just how severely his convalescence has curtailed the physical side of their relationship. The kiss ends with John almost straddling him, trying to get as close as he can without disturbing Sherlock’s shoulder. 

John lets out an unsteady breath against Sherlock’s jawline. “Christ, you had better heal up quickly.” 

“Hmm. You do realize that most of my body is working perfectly well.”

John licks his lips. “Pretty sure you’re supposed to be taking it easy.”

“John, I’ve been taking it easy for ages.” Sherlock gives the back of John’s shirt a sharp upward tug, then shifts his hand downward to find the exposed strip of skin above the waistband of his jeans. John jolts a bit at the contact, but doesn’t pull away. In fact, he presses closer, and starts...oh. He slides his hand up under the edge of Sherlock’s T-shirt, blunt fingers warm on his flank. After his period of enforced abstinence, even that slight touch is enough to make Sherlock shiver with pleasure. He can tell from John’s roughened breathing that he is in the same state, on edge and ready to start disregarding his own medical advice at any moment. Sherlock intends to take full advantage.

It’s true that there isn’t that much he can do with only his left arm, confined to the back side of John’s body, but what he can do, he does, worming his hand farther down until he has a satisfying handful of pliant flesh. John, however, is under no such constraints; he lets his hand play over Sherlock’s belly, then slides experimentally to the front on his pajamas, caressing him through the thin cotton. When he discovers that Sherlock is hard, he gives a small, wicked chuckle, and it’s this, as much as the touch, that makes Sherlock squirm and gasp.

“More,” he whispers, “Please, John.”

“Hn. You’ll be tired afterwards, if I do.”

“Is that a promise?”

John gives a snort of amusement, then slips his hand inside Sherlock’s pajamas to offer a few short, firm strokes. The contact is electric, and Sherlock wants to arch upward, but that would put unacceptable pressure on his upper back, so he settles for rocking his hips minutely against John’s grip. John scoots upward, without removing his hand, to capture Sherlock’s open mouth in a sweetly dominant kiss, their teeth clacking together a little as John explores him. The rhythm of his hand echoes his probing tongue, and Sherlock is struck by the sudden, slightly embarrassing realization that this isn’t going to take long at all. 

Determined to give as good as he gets, he closes his lips to suck John’s tongue. John gives a surprised moan, and the motion of his hand speeds up, and Sherlock can’t help arching upward just a little as hot, oblivious pleasure courses through him. Sweat springs out all over his body, and he has to break the kiss to concentrate on the sharp-edged thing that is trying to crest within him. 

“Gorgeous,” John whispers. 

“ _Oh_ \--”

Sherlock is sagging down on the sofa, feet trying to lift off the floor as he spasms on the edge of release. It seems he hovers there for an age, pulled taut and humming, before finally, finally breaking free. He’s dimly aware of John’s quiet growl of approval as he unburdens himself, spilling hotly over John’s hand and into the waistband of his pajamas. John kisses him again, soft and comforting, and he allows himself to float, dimly aware that he’s going to ache in a few minutes, but feeling for now that it was so, so worth it.

It is at just this moment that the downstairs doorbell rings. Sherlock ignores it, but he feels John tense against him.

“Shit,” John says. “I did get a text from Mycroft while I was out. I didn’t read it.”

The street door opens, and Mycroft’s voice is clearly audible as he wishes Mrs. Hudson good morning. Soon afterward, his footsteps begin ascending the stairs. 

“Shit,” John says again, pulling his hand hastily out of Sherlock’s trousers. “Do you want to go and clean up? I can look after him.”

“Nonsense. You might want to avoid shaking hands, though.”

Shooting him a murderous look, John scampers for the loo. Sherlock smirks and pulls his dressing gown primly shut (as best he can, considering only his left arm is through the sleeve). He resituates himself on his cushions, picks up his cold cup of tea, and has managed to assume what he thinks is a pretty convincing air of nonchalance by the time Mycroft taps on the sitting room door.

“Go away,” Sherlock calls. Mycroft, naturally, lets himself in.

“Ugh, Mycroft. What do you want? I’m supposed to be resting.”

Mycroft takes in Sherlock and the rest of the room with a dismissive glance. 

“Hmm, yes, you do look rather tired.” 

Sherlock rolls his eyes in response, but Mycroft ignores him. He sits down without being asked, then takes a bound sheaf of papers out of his bag. “I shan’t take up too much of your time. I only thought you might like to see this.”

He hands the papers to Sherlock, but the title page bears only a code number, meaningless.

“What is it?” asks John, coming back into the room. He still smells pleasingly of sex, but with a new overlay of fresh soap. 

“It is the final draft of a report detailing everything that Doctor Flannagan and her cohorts were up to. It was requested by the home secretary following your rescue. Naturally that office professes to have had no knowledge of the facility prior to seeing the television footage.”

“Yes, about that,” John says. “I saw it on the news. How did they find out about it? I mean, not that they seemed too clear what exactly was going on.”

“I alerted the media, naturally,” Mycroft says. “It was rather tricky timing, too, between the news vans and the ATB troops and Sherlock being...well.”

“Hmm,” says John. “So you got your scandal, after all.” Sherlock flips through the report while they’re speaking. It appears to be quite comprehensive and...eye-opening.

“Indeed,” Mycroft agrees. “I think we can expect an indictment within the next few days. Probably several of them. It seems there may be more than a few missing person cases that are traceable to these activities.”

“What about Thomas Mason?” Sherlock asks.

“We’ve spoken,” Mycroft says. 

“And?”

“And, he has agreed to perform certain services, provided his name is kept out of this report. We are moving him tonight to a facility in Arizona, where he’ll receive expert care until he can return to his former studies.”

“You mean looking for a cure,” John says.

Mycroft inclines his head. “Or at least a palliative. Flannagan’s notes had little to say on the subject. She was far more concerned with exacerbating the condition than with mitigating it.”

“Are there...others?” John asks. “Other werewolves?”

“A fair few.” Mycroft’s eyes slide away evasively. _How many?_ Sherlock wonders. How many have gone to their fate, without having a faithful protector to put a bullet through them? “They’re being...dealt with. On an individual basis, depending on the severity of their condition. In any case.” Mycroft stands. “I’ll let you get back to your recuperation. I only thought you might like to know that the operation was a success.”

“Can I keep this?” Sherlock asks.

“Of course. Please alert me if you notice anything of interest.”

John sees Mycroft out, then comes back to sit with Sherlock on the sofa.

“You okay?” he asks, softly touching Sherlock’s face. “Your cheeks are quite red.” 

“So are yours.” 

“I’ll bet they are,” John says, smiling. His eyes are bright with something. Fondness, amusement. “We must have looked quite a pair.”

“Hm, just be glad he doesn’t have my nose.”

John laughs, a sweet sound. “Well, I’ve always been glad you don’t have his.”

Sherlock laughs, too, and it hurts a little, but he doesn’t mind. It isn’t perfect--nothing about his life has ever been perfect. But just now it feels closer than it has in years, and never mind the wolf. He can handle the wolf. Just now, he feels that he could handle anything.


	11. Epilogue

“Christ, Sherlock!”

John barely has the breath to gasp out the words, his body shuddering as Sherlock assaults his neck with a flurry of quick nips. Sherlock has him pinned to the sitting room door--again--and seems to be trying to get rid of his and John’s clothes by dint of friction of alone. John doesn’t mind; he grinds back against Sherlock’s onslaught. He would put his arms around him to pull him closer still, except that Sherlock has his wrists in a firm hold, pinning them on either side of John’s hips, which is fucking glorious. He stills for a moment, and John can hear his quick, rough breathing before he makes a low, carnal sound below John’s ear. Then...he bites. His teeth close on John’s skin, hard enough to leave a mark. John’s knees and insides both turn to the same sort of quivering jelly as the sharp sting and slow, bruising suction combine to take him from fairly turned on to completely ruined. He thinks he makes a sound. He isn’t sure.

In a couple of weeks, Sherlock will change for the thirteenth time. It’s been a strange, long year, with Sherlock doing all right much of the time, but occasionally not very well at all. The first time Sherlock did _this_ (well, the second time, if you counted that one occasion when Thomas Mason was in the house), he was an absolute wreck afterwards, and John needed to go to great lengths to reassure him that, yes, he actually did enjoy a bit of dominant behavior from Sherlock now and then, and yes, he did enjoy the biting, and no, he didn’t mind going about with Sherlock’s possessive marks on his neck...that, in fact, he thought it was pretty much the sexiest thing in the world. 

Sherlock worried, though. He seemed to think this desire was something that came from the wolf, but John has never believed that. John has known him for a long time: before the wolf, and after. And really, there’s nothing Sherlock has done in bed with John that isn’t compatible with one of his ordinary pre-wolf moods. He’s fully capable of being whiney and selfish just about as often as he is generous and considerate. This particular facet of his lovemaking--dominant, brilliant, calamitous--only seems like a natural extension of the mood he gets into on especially stimulating cases, when he knows he’s the brightest light in the room and takes devilish joy in blinding everyone. John actually enjoys all of his moods, and enjoys playing against them. When Sherlock is petulant, John provides discipline. When Sherlock is imperious, John is...

“Oh, god, _god_ , please can you just...”

Sherlock releases John’s neck with an agonizing slide of teeth.

“Just what?” he growls, hot against John’s ear.

“Anything, christ, just don’t make me wait for it.”

Sherlock makes a predatory sound, then pulls abruptly away from John, releasing one of his hands. Gripping the other tightly, he pulls John with him toward the bedroom. Once there, Sherlock releases him and begins efficiently stripping out of his clothes. John does the same, and the second he’s fully naked, Sherlock’s weight is on him, shoving him backward and down onto the bed. 

This whole thing has been an eye-opener for John, of course. He couldn’t have guessed, when he first realized he was interested in Sherlock, how good it would actually feel to be with him. He could not have predicted the full-nervous-system rush that he gets from having Sherlock’s body above him, the taut arches of him like a temple’s vaulted ceiling, marble-white except for the new red bloom of the scar that mirrors John’s own. He could not have imagined the precise degree to which Sherlock’s long lines arouse him when they are pressed close together so that he can feel how Sherlock is taller than he is, able to catch and cage him with his clever, wiry strength. And he could never, ever have foreseen, not in a thousand nights of fevered fantasy, how much he would come to love the sensation of Sherlock’s long, strong, slick fingers stroking into the cleft of his body.

Even after Sherlock’s injuries healed enough for sex to become a regular thing, it seemed to take forever to convince him that he could do whatever he liked, and John wouldn’t mind--or if he did, he would say so, although so far Sherlock hasn’t pushed beyond John’s limits. He has tested them, though; or rather, he has expanded them. At his age, John had thought himself through with firsts, but Sherlock has taught him better. Once John made him understand--on one memorable night, a few months in--that he was far more interested in Sherlock’s passions, in all their unbridled weirdness, than in his misguided attempts to protect John from being shocked back into heterosexuality, Sherlock proceeded to introduce him to a whole new assortment of firsts, of new ways to touch and be touched, new extremities of feeling of which John would never have suspected that his body--or, indeed, his heart--was capable. And oh, his heart is in it. John Watson is still incandescently, overwhelmingly in love.

Sherlock is impatient; John can tell by the tension in his limbs, by the way he grips John’s flesh. Still, he is careful, slowly and methodically seeking out John’s points of pleasure, striking each note before he moves on, making sure that John is going to be ready for him. It’s not that John doesn’t appreciate it, but it still makes him want to growl with frustration.

“More,” he demands. 

With a dark chuckle of agreement, Sherlock gives him more.

***

Afterward, cleaned up and shagged out, they go for Chinese. It’s a quiet meal, with their feet touching under the table, Sherlock already winding down from the high of the case and the sex. They walk home hand in hand, and John allows himself a moment of pleased anticipation for the hours ahead: a long, deep, well-earned sleep in Sherlock’s arms, a late lie-in, a drowsy breakfast, perhaps another go in Sherlock’s bed, or just a quiet afternoon reading, or maybe a film. The gentle routine of their days off together. 

But when they return to the flat, Sherlock freezes just inside the street door.

“Someone’s been here.”

He stands breathing though his nose for a moment, and John realizes that he’s sniffing the air. It’s funny, John thinks, how he’s incorporated his heightened sense into his ordinary observational repertoire. There are probably other ways he could deduce who’s been in the building, and why, but scent is convenient, so Sherlock uses it.

“One of Mycroft’s people,” he says. His mouth twists wryly. “Well, best check the flat for bugs.”

It’s only half a joke, but when they get upstairs, it’s clear that their unknown visitor had another purpose entirely; there’s something waiting for them on the kitchen table. John recognizes it instantly: it’s a portable battery-powered cooler, of the kind that’s used to transport vaccines. Next to it is an envelope and a package of disposable syringes. John bites his lip, not wanting to think about what it might or might not mean. 

Sherlock is too intent on examining the items to take any notice of John’s reaction. He flips the cooler open briefly, letting it fall closed again as he takes up the envelope. John opens the cooler and looks inside: drug vials, twenty-four of them, with standard latex-free rubber stoppers. They are unlabeled, each filled with a clear liquid. 

Sherlock has taken some papers from the envelope. His expression is dismissive at first, but as he reads, his face becomes opaque, carefully expressionless. 

“Sherlock?” John says.

Sherlock doesn’t answer. A muscle twitches in his jaw as he flips from one page to the next. When he gets to the third page, he looks at it briefly, then tosses the whole thing onto the table and stalks away into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. 

With a cold feeling in his gut, John takes up the handwritten pages. The first item is a brief note on fine, heavy paper, and, although he might not be able to tell a Parker from a Mont Blanc, he knows when he’s looking at the output of a high-end fountain pen. But then, just knowing it’s from Mycroft would tell him that.

_Dear Sherlock,  
I write these lines in order to assure you of the authenticity of what follows. As far as I have been able to discern, his claims are true. While I hardly expect you to proceed with blind optimism, I hope you will not be so skeptical as to forego the chance that is being offered you. I have every reason to hope for success. _

_\--MH_

Frowning, John moves on to the attached letter. It’s written in blue ballpoint on sheets of lined paper torn from a notepad. The writing is fast and messy, alternately cramped and sprawling.

_To Sherlock Holmes:_

_I expect you are surprised to hear from me after the manner in which we parted company, and yet, here I am, explaining myself to you as though I owe you something. But then, perhaps I do, in a way. So here’s this._

_For a start, the medicine. I came up with this after a sudden stroke of inspiration: perhaps instead of starting with the blood, one could start with the moon. I suppose that sounds like nonsense, but, of course, I was not exactly sane at the time, so I thought it quite brilliant. The odd thing is that it worked. What I have sent you is a course of anti-lycanthropic serum. I have taken it myself, and the results are most encouraging. I have not been out of my right mind (or right body) for the past three months. It may or may not be permanent, but certainly it is effective. I am teaching the method to a team of scientists introduced to me by your brother, so that it can continue to be made after I retire (that is by way of a joke, because of course “retire” is a word for people who have a career, which I do not)._

_The only thing to which you may object is the method of administration. You must take the medicine twice each month, at sundown: once at the full moon and once at the half (start at the half, of course). Inject 30 ccs intramuscularly (I’ve been doing upper arm, seems to work fine). That’s all as you might expect, but the other bit is that you need three pieces of silver (enclosed), of which you must hold one in your mouth and one in each hand (so most convenient if an assistant injects). Also light three pure beeswax candles in silver candlesticks. Not a bad idea to burn a bit of incense beforehand, as well, to set the mood. I know all of this is contrary your empirical nature (mine too, believe me) but the sympathetic magic is actually crucial to the compound’s efficacy. Tried it without and was set back dreadfully, do not recommend. Oh, and, once you start you must stick with it. Setbacks, again, as I said._

_I think this is the part of the letter where I’m supposed to say something heartfelt, or comforting. Close the case, as it were. But I haven’t anything. May you fare as well as can be expected, under the circumstances._

_Yours,  
Thomas S. Mason, PhD (haha)_

_P.S. I understand that John fellow was dating my sister before Dr. F’s fuckers murdered her to get your attention. He doesn’t seem a bad bloke, maybe he can do your injections. I hope no hard feelings for my having Leapt Upon him. I suppose I can thank you for avenging Abby’s death, and such things. So. Consider it said.  
_

John presses his lips together. He sets down the letter and goes after Sherlock. Sherlock isn’t in the bedroom, so John checks the bathroom, where he finds Sherlock sitting fully clothed in the empty bathtub, knees folded close to his chest.

“Sherlock?”

Sherlock glances at him, but says nothing. After a moment, John toes his shoes off and joins him in the tub, sitting down opposite and letting his legs stretch out into Sherlock’s space. Sherlock unfolds his own legs so that they are entangled, John’s knees pressed against cool porcelain while Sherlock’s long white feet cradle his hips. 

John ponders what to say. He’s not sure why Sherlock is reacting this way to what seems to John like momentously wonderful news. It’s proof, again, that he’ll never be able to fully understand what Sherlock has been through, what he’s still going through every month; hell, every day. Sherlock seems so normal sometimes, it’s easy for John to forget. But Sherlock, of course, never forgets.

“So what do you think?” John asks.

Sherlock’s feet twitch nervously against him. Sherlock turns his head away, pressing his forehead to his wrist. He gulps before speaking.

“I’m afraid,” he says, at last. 

John drops a hand to squeeze Sherlock’s calf, all he can reach in this position. 

“Of what?” he asks.

“I’m--not sure.” Sherlock blinks rapidly. John waits for him to find words. “I feel that it...won’t work. It’s illogical, but I feel as though...as though the bite was only a coincidence. As though it’s part of me. As though it can’t be subtracted.”

“But, Sherlock,” John says. “You’re wrong. It’s not part of you, you know it’s not. I knew you before it happened.”

Sherlock gulps again. “You thought you did,” he says. “But the wolf, it...it built itself from parts of me. What if...what if I try this and it doesn’t work? Then I’ll know that it’s really just...me.”  “Sherlock, listen to me.” John leans forward, grabs Sherlock’s arms and pulls him so that they’re leaning together. John scoots forward to make it easier, although it’s a crowded business with Sherlock’s long legs and the close confines. It’s not easy getting close to Sherlock, but John manages it, gets his face right up close to Sherlock’s and looks him in the eye.

“Listen to me,” he says again. “I’ve seen it. I’ve _seen_ it, Sherlock. And that animal is no part of you.”  Sherlock’s eyes are wide. His breath comes fast through his nose. John shakes him gently, hoping desperately to make him see the truth.

“Sherlock. It’s fooling you. It’s made of your fears, your hurts. And I don’t think you’d have so much of that for it to feed on if you weren’t...if you didn’t deserve to be happy. I can’t make you try this stuff. But I hope you will. And if it fails, I’m still not going anywhere.” 

Sherlock takes John’s hand and pulls it to his chest. His eyes search John’s face.

“Will you help me with it?” he asks.    
“Of course, Sherlock. Of course I will.”

***

It is twilight on the night of the new moon. Sherlock has checked the precise official time of sundown, and has procured the necessary supplies. Freshly bathed, he enters the siting room, where three candles are burning on the tea table, and a smell of incense hangs in the air, redolent of complex botanical esters, smoke, and rich, damp earth. John is standing nervously to one side, holding a drug vial in one hand and a wrapped syringe in the other.

The room is dark, apart from the candles, which feels...right. The sky outside is opal-blue, flecked with orange street-light. 

“Are you ready?” John asks. 

Sherlock considers this. He still feels uncertainty, but it’s a low flutter beneath the solidity of a decision made. And of course, they won’t really know if it’s failed until two weeks from now, on the full moon.

He had intended to sit down in his chair, but somehow that doesn’t feel right. The scene demands something different. He shucks off his dressing gown and throws it onto a chair, then approaches the tableau: John, the three candles, three silver coins laid out on the table. Sherlock is wearing only his pajama bottoms, and the scented air feels cool against the bare skin of his torso. He kneels, feeling the fibers of the wool carpet compressing beneath his knees. His slides a coin off of the table with each hand, two small, cool weighs against his palms. He rests his hands on his thighs.

“Ready,” he says. 

John takes up the third coin. For a moment it flashes in the candlelight like a tiny, round moon. Sherlock parts his lips so that John can set the disc of silver on his tongue, the metallic flavor of it filling his mouth. John closes his jaw with a firm, warm touch, then moves to one side. Sherlock watches as John dabs rubbing alcohol on a bit of cotton, then rubs the skin of Sherlock’s upper arm, leaving stark cold behind as the alcohol evaporates. 

John plunges the needle through the rubber stopper. Sherlock finds he doesn’t want to watch this part; he lets his eyes fall on the middle of the three candle flames, flickering slightly as his breath disturbs it. Calm. In through the nose, out through the mouth, air passing over the metal on his tongue. The candle flame stills.

The prick of the needle in his arm is so delicate that he scarcely feels it. He feels the thin flow of the medicine into his body. It shouldn’t do anything, not now, it’s just a prophylactic. He won’t know its effects for another half a lunar cycle. And yet...he does feel something, a shuddering, a fear, not his own. He remembers, unbidden, the night that John shot him, seeing John through the wolf’s eyes as it lay pinned, its blood seeping away into the ground. 

He no longer sees the candle flame. He sees, instead, the way he used to be: brilliant, cold, foolish. Feeling things, and not even knowing what it was he felt. Wanting things, but being too proud or too frightened to ask for them, but not knowing pride, not knowing fear. He knows them now, as intimate companions. He has learned what he wants, has learned to ask for it. The wolf has taught him that, perhaps. He’ll never be the same now, even if it leaves him. It will be good, he thinks, not being the same. 

“All right, Sherlock?” John’s finger touches his cheek, bringing him back to himself. 

“Yes.” He looks up to find John’s eyes, glittering in candlelight.

***

The full moon requires special arrangements. They can’t depend on the drug’s efficacy, but Sherlock is loathe to conduct the--ritual, he supposes it must be called--away from home. The problem is that the drug has to be administered at sundown; if the new-moon dose wasn’t effective, then he’ll be right on the verge of changing. John will be all right--he should be able to get away when it becomes clear what’s going to happen--but Sherlock will need to be in a safe place. Normally, Mycroft provides him with a place to wait out his transformation every month, a featureless concrete cell in the basement of a government building (with John camping out nearby, unwilling to let Sherlock go through it alone). But he doesn’t want to do this in that place, at least in part because he doesn’t want Mycroft to have the excuse to be nearby, to express...whatever he might express, at the treatment’s success or failure. Sherlock wants to do this alone, with John, at home.

But he can’t do it in the flat, either. It’s too insecure, and too filled with things that he doesn’t want to wreck, or move, or cut himself on. So he and John agree to do it in 221 C, where he locked himself in on the night when John discovered him a year before. 

Insisting that they do it right this time, John makes some changes. He hires someone to come and install a steel security door in place of the old wooden one, and metal grilles over the windows. They feed some story to Mrs. Hudson about needing secure lab space for a special experiment. She rolls her eyes.

“Well I don’t believe a word of that, but you boys can do what you like with the place,” she says. “I never bothered to fix the damage from that strange break-in a year ago, since nobody’s ever wanted to rent it anyway. You can’t possibly make it any less marketable than it already is. Perhaps when you’re through I can convince another mad scientist to live there.”

But of course they have to send her away. It’s no great feat for Sherlock to plant the idea in her head of going to visit the ailing aunt again.

At last the fateful day arrives. Sherlock spends the entire day trying to decide whether he feels any different from normal. 

“John, my temper is volatile.”

“Stress, Sherlock, I keep telling you.”

“My palms are sweating, why are they sweating?”

“It’s a heat wave, Sherlock. Mine are sweating too.”

“My sense of smell is dramatically magnified. Your aftershave is overwhelming.”  “Ugh, don’t I know it. I spilled half the bottle on the floor of the loo this morning. Afraid we’ll be smelling that for another month.”

“John, I think my libido is elevated.”

John lowers the top of his newspaper at that.

“Are you trying to get me into the sack?”

Sherlock considers the question. He hadn’t been, exactly, but he really could use a distraction. 

From John’s expression, it looks like he must be reading Sherlock’s thoughts. Sherlock puts on his most seductive half-smile, and does that thing with his eyebrows that he knows John likes. 

“Yes,” he says.

“Right, then.”

John puts down the newspaper, and Sherlock is distracted for a while.

***

Evening. They bring the supplies downstairs half an hour before dark, then sit together on the floor, waiting, while the incense burns. They are holding hands.

“Hard to believe it was year ago,” John says. 

“Not quite a year,” Sherlock says. “Only twelve lunar cycles.”

“Close enough. It’s just...I never would have thought back then that we’d be where we are now.”

“Which part?” Sherlock asks. 

“Any of it,” John says, absently massaging the base of Sherlock’s thumb. “That was the first time you slept in my bed.”

“I remember,” Sherlock says. “I told you I was a werewolf.” He pauses, remembering that strange morning, the sweet and bitter and blood-saltiness of it. “You told me you were in love with me.”

“Yes,” John says, smiling.

“Will you still love me if I’m not dangerous anymore?”

John kisses his forehead. “Git,” he says. “You’ll always be dangerous.”

***

They light the candles at the appointed hour. When Sherlock takes the two silver coins in his hands, they feel electric, sending a current of something indescribable up his arms and through his heart. 

“All right?” John asks. Sherlock nods, not trusting his voice. His hands come to rest on the floor to either side of his hips; they feel heavy, rooted through the floor to the earth below. He doesn’t remember to open his mouth until he feels the touch of John’s finger on his chin; when he parts his lips, John kisses him, which pulls the bright, undulating thing inside him up into his throat, into his brainstem, making him feel light and peculiar. It remains there after John releases him, but then John sets the last piece of silver on his tongue, and Sherlock feels a sword of energy striking downward, through his body and into the earth, rooting him.

John doesn’t ask him to speak again, just gets on with his task. When the needle pierces his flesh, Sherlock understands, suddenly, how the magic--for this is certainly magic--works. As his bloodstream carries the medicine through his body, the white-hot energy goes with it, filling him utterly, leaving no room for the wolf. It is working. It is going to work.

He’s not sure how long he kneels there, with cold white fire coursing through his veins. He is only dimly aware of his surroundings, of John crouching down beside him. Little by little, the fire transmutes into something else. It takes a long time for him to realize that it is relief. With an effort, he pulls his consciousness up out of the ground, up through his center, into his head again. 

When he opens his eyes, he finds John peering intently at him, his face unreadable.

“John?” Sherlock asks, voice shaking. The silver piece impedes the syllable slightly.

John raises a hand to gently stroke Sherlock’s cheek, as though checking that he is still there. 

“It makes your eyes glow,” he says. Then he leans in to kiss Sherlock gently, fondly, not enough to disturb the coin. “How do you feel? Is it over?”   
Sherlock passes a coin from his right hand to his left, then plucks the third from his tongue.

“Is the moon up?”

“Should be.”

“I want to see it.”

After a moment, John nods. Sherlock blows out the candles, and then they ascend together up the short flight of stairs from the basement flat, and out into the cool air. The night is clear, a few stars visible through London’s nebula of streetlight. Without needing to discuss it, they take the turn toward the nearby park, where the open grass reveals a greater breadth of sky.

 The moon has not yet made its way above the jagged crenelation of the skyline, but Sherlock knows where it will appear. There’s a bench they could sit on, but Sherlock leads them past it, up a grassy rise topped by a hedge. There’s no one else nearby to object to their treading off the paths. They sit down together, their feet folding the green blades, releasing scent. The earth radiates cool dampness through the seats of their trousers. Sherlock takes John’s hand.

It doesn’t take long for the first sliver of yellow-white to appear, seeming large against the fine details of the horizon. Sherlock searches inside himself for a reaction, but there is nothing, only the quiet, only his body and mind and heart. As the moon climbs higher it grows smaller, whiter, nothing more than a five-pence piece glinting in the light of the unseen sun.

John’s hand squeezes his, and Sherlock breathes, leaning into him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that, ladies and gentlemen, is that. This project ended up being so much more epic than I originally intended. Huge, enormous thanks are due to everyone who stuck with me throughout! Your comments were all that kept me going at times. May the gods of fandom bless you all.


End file.
